This volume is written jointly by Witold Marciszewski, who contributed the introductory and the three subsequent chapters, and Roman Murawski who is the author of the next ones - those concerned with the 19th century and the modern inquiries into formalization, algebraization and mechanization of reasonings. Besides the authors there are other persons, as well as institutions, to whom the book owes its coming into being.
The study which resulted in this volume was carried out in the Historical Section of the research project Logical Systems and Algorithms for Automatic Testing of...

Concepts of totalitarianism have undergone an academic revival in recent years, particularly since the breakdown of communist systems in Europe in 1989-91: the totalitarian paradigm, so it seems to many scholars today, had been discarded prematurely in the heat of the Cold War. The demise of communism as a social system is, however, not only an important cause of the recurring attractiveness of the totalitarian paradigm, but provides at the same time new evidence and, correspondingly, new problems of explanation for all approaches in communist studies and totalitarianism theory in...