Blackwell Reference Online

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Florian Znaniecki was born to a well-to-do Polish family living in Russian-occupied territory. His active support of Polish nationalism resulted in his dismissal from the University of Warsaw and an extended stay abroad. He studied at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne. He later returned, this time to the University of Cracow, receiving his doctorate there in 1910. While helping Poles to migrate he met W. I. Thomas, who in 1914 invited Znaniecki to join him at the University of Chicago. Shortly thereafter the two began work on the famous five-volume study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America , published between 1918 and 1920. Znaniecki taught at Columbia University (1916–17), at the University of Chicago (1917–19), and in 1920 following Polish independence, became professor of philosophy at the new University of Pozna'n. Here he helped establish sociology, founded the Polish Institute of Sociology, and in 1929 launched a Polish sociological journal. Following the conquest of Poland in World War II, he was invited to Columbia University (1939). In 1941 he went as professor of sociology to the University of Illinois, retiring from there in 1951. Before his death in 1958, he was elected president of the American Sociological Society (1955). Znaniecki, with W. I. Thomas and others, is often singled out as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, primarily for his ... log in or subscribe to read full text