ABSTRACT
Roman Dmowski was the principal ideologist of the Polish Right. Before the First World War it was he who, together with Jan Poplawski and Zygmunt Balicki, provided the intellectual underpinning for a new movement, National Democracy, which, in its various forms, dominated right-wing politics in Poland until the end of the Second World War. Dmowski was a biologist by training and his political ideas were deeply influenced by Social Darwinism, which began to have an impact in Poland in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The national organism must aim to absorb only that which it can assimilate and use to increase the growth and collective strength of the body. Dmowski’s ideas in the period before the First World War were written in clear, easily assimilated language and soon acquired wide currency and evident popularity. His originality lay not in his basic concepts, which were commonplaces of the nationalist reaction of the 1890s.
