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Facing the current banking crisis which can be described as a confrontation between governing powers, private banks enjoying political and legal privileges and the rest of the society, the issue of international terrorism seems to be less attractive for the mass media. Bad economic results in the countries of western civilization were caused by reckless activities of big national companies and speculative capital rather than by terrorism. In recent years all western countries have been engaged in the fight against terrorism, there is no government which would not address the threat of terrorism in its security strategy. Moreover, many countries wrote long chapters devoted entirely to action plans counteracting terrorism. Terrorism is not an extraordinary phenomenon characteristic only for the contemporary times. It has a tradition which is centuries long – the only difference is that today we have wide access to information via mass media, it is so much easier to spread the word. Terrorism should be treated as a political phenomenon and as a consequence of exercising power in a certain way. This phenomenon affects security understood in global, national and regional sense. On all levels it has similar effects. Last but not least, it has an impact on the defence of international structures, in particular of national nature. At the moment Poland is not in a position to guarantee security of its territory by military means and is not capable to conduct anti-terrorist operations in case of necessity.

Application of autobiographical documents in sociological and historical sciences has revealed an exceptionally large body of such documents in Poland. In world science this heritage has been referred to as "the Polish method," which was initiated by the classical five-volume work of Znaniecki and Thomas The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Between the first and second World Wars the schools of Znaniecki, Krzywicldi, Chalasiński, and Grabski contributed significantly to this branch of scholarship. The school of diary analysis was revived in 1956 by W. Markiewicz, Z. Dulczewski and A. Kwilecki. In Warsaw sociologists focussed on the continuation of the "Young Generation of Peasants" centred round J. Chalasiński and J. Szczepański, whereas D. Galaj headed a group of scholars of industrializition. processes and family transformations at the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development, Polish Academy of Sciences. A new, dynamic centre associated with the workers' movement of 1980 was formed by M. Latoszek in Gdańsk and by J. Leoński and T. Rzepa in Szczecin. The Polish and Polish Emigrants Autobiographical Documents Centre in Rudno near Warsaw began to serve as an archival, methodological and research centre on an internaional scale. The diary method included ontological, epistemological and methological directives. The penetration and development of the ontological and epistemological aspects of this method refer to F. Znaniecki's "humanistic factor" and the materialistic dialectics of L. Krzywicki. Thanks to the rejection of K. Marx's deterministic fatalism, conscious factors could regain their central role in the structure and processes of social reality. In his inter-disciplinary verifications L. Krzywicki was able to show that diary documents are true reflections of the material conditions of life, objective social relationships and the dynamics of consciousness at all levels of society. The problems of diary methodology were discussed in inter-disciplinary fashion by the quarterly Pamiętnikarstwo Polskie its continuation, Pami&eogontnikoznawstwo Polskie. The Eastern European Diary Documentation and Oral History Centre and its journal, Autobiography and Society, were established in Rudno and Lvov. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the attempts made in Poland for a radical revision of the traditional approach to the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism in sociology. Research on the latter may and should have the character of research on the world of objects. At the same time, however, it should lead to an understanding of their human content, which is revealed in their social and individual genealogy. Another attempt made in order to provide a sociological interpretation of the basic philosophical problem is F. Znaniecki's principle--formulated in his Methodological Note--the principle of comprehending all phenomena of social life as those arising by way of a dialectical interaction of the elements and determinants playing basic part in the sphere of human relations: of the objective factor of the values and the subjective factor of attitudes. The analysis of Znaniecki's system, carried out after the second World War, were marked by a negation of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of that sociologist. Znaniecki understands experience as a passive perception, usually ordered due to the notional categories of reason. It is correct and justified from the scientific point of view to treat the wealth of life-records as full-fledged source of information about both the material conditions of life and the objective social and political relations.