ABSTRACT
The continuity of the process of Poland's development was clearly disrupted in the years 1980-1982. The analyses that have been attempted in Poland tend to interpret the developments as uniquely Polish. The process of Poland's development saw a powerful juncture between economic development and social and moral problems, which became quite pronounced during the crisis of 1980-1981. In Poland the lack of cohesion manifested itself and led to a discrepancy between policy aims and society's aspirations and a conflict between these aims and institutional solutions. There is the important problem of parallelism in the aspirations and strivings of the political authorities and the aspirations and expectations of society. The direct reason for all the conflicts was the manifest contradiction between the authorities' development mission and the strivings of society. The 1970s produced more discrepancies between the authorities' mission and society's aspirations. The clash between the development mission and society's standard-of-living aspirations has a larger dimension.
