ABSTRACT
The word "liberal" in the sense more or less resembling its current political meaning appeared for the first time in the Polish language in 1816, thus closely following its appearance on the European political scene. The real alternative appeared nevertheless in the form of the dissident movement in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. This movement was based on certain general ideas which Szacki calls "protoliberal." The process of revival or, one may say more accurately, of "re-transplantation" of liberalism in Poland began in the 1980s. Dzielski's liberalism was based mainly on the neoliberal thought of F. A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman and shared their defiance of state regulations and interventions, as well as their insistence on the individual economic initiative. The first element was purely "theoretical" and sounded rather abstract in the Polish reality of the 1980s. But the second one had a very direct relation to the context of crumbling communist system.
