Nobody listens to the voices of Central and Eastern Europe until a war breaks out. The region offers a distinctive conservative experience—that of an interface periphery torn between Russia and Germany, East and West. In these bloodlands, conservatism arose not from economic or political power but from cultural, moral, and spiritual capital: local forms of meaning not easily grasped by political centres.

Join Professor Michał Łuczewski, Chair of the Integral Development and Solidarity Lab at the University of Warsaw, and Professor Thomas Simpson, Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy, for a talk as part of the Learning from the Right programme.

Drawing on examples from Poland, this talk explores the paradoxes that define the region’s conservative imagination: conserving in societies where the continuity of history has been shattered; deep cultural traditionalism combined with unprecedented economic progress, political creativity, and reform; the coexistence of lateral violence and polarization with solidarity and the self-giving intelligence of the victim; and cultivating an intellectual vocation within a polarized yet deeply educated public sphere. The lecture argues that Polish conservatism, like that of the wider region, rests less on economics than on poetic beauty, moral imagination, and Christian humanism. Its mind has been shaped not only by politicians, entrepreneurs, or lawyers, but by poets, priests, and popes.

Michał Łuczewski

Professor Michał Łuczewski is a sociologist, psychologist, and Polish public intellectual. At the University of Warsaw, he chairs the IDEAS Lab, which builds bridges between the social sciences, theology, and the study of moral capital. He has served on the National Development Council in the President’s Office of the Republic of Poland and on the Prime Minister’s COVID-19 Council. He is also Vice President of the Poland: Great Project Foundation, the leading intellectual platform behind Poland’s conservative realignment and the Trimarium Initiative. For more than two decades, he has designed and delivered leadership programmes across Europe and the United States, including, most recently, at the University of Oxford. Łuczewski is the editor of a recent special issue on the New Sociology of Leadership, exploring the moral and spiritual dimensions of academic vocation.