ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an auto-biographical review of Piotr Sztompka's journey into the intellectual and social-political contexts. Piotr received an elementary musical education, but soon decided that his many and diverse interests precluded an exclusive focus on practicing piano at which, frankly, he was not too good. Polish sociology, having formed well-rooted traditions and already well established at universities during the interwar period, was banned by the communist government as a conservative, "bourgeois" science, the enemy of Marxism-Leninism and "scientific communism". Polish sociologists had to devise coping strategies that would permit the performance of normal, academic work. In 1972 he acquired membership in the ruling Polish United Workers' Party, like some two million of his compatriots before him. He was consoled a few minutes later when Leo Lowenthal appeared clad in his best Viennese jacket, and a tie even darker than Piotr. In his first American book he defended the functionalist approach against the current onslaught of radical, leftist criticism.
