As Wydra sees it, neither elites nor publics have been autonomous or free to respond to changing circumstances according to detached rational cost–benefit calculations. Instead, their responses have been driven, at the unconscious level, by inherited structures of thought that generate collective patterns of interpretation and “processes of situational adjustment” (p. 22). These patterns, while fluid and indeterminate as to how specifically individuals or groups might combine elements of the inherited structures, are nonetheless predictable within the parameters of a society's or group's given cultural habitus. Although these inherited mentalities have most often been characterized as part of the negative legacies of communism, as in the “homo sovieticus” syndrome, Wydra remains refreshingly free of such value-laden terminology. Nor does he assume that the less educated social groups are the sole carriers of inherited mentalities. Indeed, his empirical focus is on Poland's political elites and how their choices and actions have been impacted by continuities at the level of the second reality. This is consistent with his theoretical aim of “detaching the concept of second reality from a functional meaning in the service of the antagonism of state vs. society” (p. 17). For Wydra, it is too simplistic and ultimately misleading to reduce the continuities of the “passions and identities” of contemporary Eastern Europe to a single faultline that pits unreconstructed societies against “modernizing” state elites. In contrast, Wydra directs our attention toward a more generalizable condition that continues to structure mentalities and situational responses regardless of social class. This condition is characterized by the perception of “the menacing dissolution of order.” Hence, in the particular circumstances of Poland, “second realities should be regarded as subjective-emotional expressions of desire to leave an unwanted or unsatisfactory situation” (p. 17) and return to order or normalcy. According to Wydra, this desire has continuously shaped Polish political culture from 1945, and even before, to the present day.

Central to the sustainability of the “pre-political identities” inherited from the communist and precommunist past has been the condition of liminality or “permanent transition” in which Poland has found itself for most of the 20th century. Or, to put it more precisely, Polish elites have consistently interpreted their country's condition as one of transition from an undesirable state to a more desirable one. In this regard, the post-1989 political establishment is no different from the post-WWII communist leadership. The empirical substance of Wydra's work, and the bulk of the chapters, elaborates on the three main consequences of this worldview: (1) A utopian public discourse that is often couched in terms of mirror images or “mimetic conflicts;” (2) the organized expression of this discourse in the “anti-structures” of “moments of nationwide communities” (p. 25), most dramatically illustrated by Solidarity; and (3) the “backwardness” of Polish political elites resulting from “their imitation of blurred images of democracy and capitalism and their recurrent reference to images of the past” (p. 30).

The major contribution of Wydra's work is not, however, his empirical findings, since he relies almost exclusively on secondary sources. The greater value clearly lies in Wydra's efforts to analyze, on the basis of the Polish case, the interactions between the objective socioeconomic conditions of backwardness and the “subjective-emotional” interpretation of these conditions, and how these interpretations become consequential in their own right. This mode of analysis draws our attention to the fact that although the Central and East European countries share many objective structural attributes of backwardness and late development, the ways in which these attributes have historically been interpreted and internalized have varied: Variances which in turn have contributed to the differential outcomes of the post-1989 period. Thus, while Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic currently seem similarly poised to escape the debilitating “in-between” state of backwardness by becoming fully consolidated democracies en route to European Union membership, the conflicts and cleavages that inform the political struggles and experiences of elites and citizens in these countries remain quite distinct as a result of different political traditions or, in Wydra's terms, the continuities of differing “national and social habitus” (p. 192).

Ultimately, however, Wydra's contribution to a cultural theory of change and continuity in postcommunist polities is undermined by inconsistencies in the logic of his argument, an underelaborated analytical framework, and the lack of serious engagement with alternative approaches. There is, for example, an apparent glaring inconsistency between Wydra's assertion that his “understanding of transition should be separated both from the fashionable `transition to democracy' and from transitional post-communism as an abnormal state of affairs” (p. 202) and the implicit reference point of Western practices and mentalities employed by the author. Polish politics is, in the final analysis, evaluated according to its “considerable distance from Western democracies in terms of political trust, social cohesion, and stable political identities” (p. 204). Given such an underlying comparison between a Polish “national and social habitus” characterized by the pursuit of (unrealizable) utopian principles and the (unrealistic) perpetual demand for change, as contrasted with the author's own idealized understanding of the “normal” habitus of Western democracies, it is at times rather hard to see the difference between Wydra's approach and those that explicitly treat “transitional post-communism as an abnormal state of affairs.” Such inconsistencies become even more problematic in the absence of a fully developed analytical framework. Wydra suggests that his analysis is guided by insights derived from the work of Norbert Elias, Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Rene Girard, and Bruno Latour (see, especially, page 25). Little effort, however, is made to relate these insights to one another in a systematic and coherent way that would help the reader understand the author's claims, where his work fits into the existing literature on cultural theory and how, in substance, his approach might deviate from alternative approaches to the study of postcommunism. Surprisingly, Wydra does not refer to the growing body of literature on the cultural aspects of postcommunist transition. As a result, when the author claims that “continuities in Poland's transition are neither evolutionary nor linear, but repetitive and ritual-like” (p. 191), not only is the contrast itself opaque, but it is unclear how his overall analysis of the continuity of “second reality” images and myths differs from other culturally oriented studies of contemporary Eastern Europe.

In short, this work should be read both with a sense of appreciation for the author's efforts to recast our analytical perceptions of the transition and with a critical sense of how this project might be improved upon.