Henryk Kamienski

(pseudonym, Philaret Prawdowski). Born Feb. 24, 1813, in Warsaw; died Jan. 14, 1866, in Algiers. Polish revolutionary, philosopher, and economist. The son of a general.

Kamienski fought in the Polish uprising of 1830–31. In the 1840’s he was an ideologist of the Polish National Liberation Democratic Movement: he proclaimed the inseparability of antifeudal reforms from the national liberation struggle through a partisan war and called for the complete liberation of the peasantry from the oppression of the szlachta (Polish gentry) and the allotment of land to the peasants.

Kamienski’s world view combined concern for the problems of German classical philosophy, primarily Hegelian, with the ideas of the French Utopian socialists, especially the Saint-Simonians. For Kamienski man was an absolute, a rational intellectual being whose work is embodied in social products and in actions. His major work, The Philosophy of the Material Economy of Human Society (vols. 1–2, 1843–45), presents a philosophical analysis of the political economy of his time.

Kamienski was arrested in 1845 and exiled to Viatka; he moved to Switzerland in 1852. In the 1850’s his views evolved toward liberalism. A. I. Herzen praised Kamienski’s views on Russian-Polish relations as expressed in Russia and Europe: Poland (1857).