At the Institute

Abstract

Kwiatkowski’s choice of Lipinski to head his institute was an inspired one. Lipiński was as energetic in economic research and theory as his patron was in industrial construction. Edward Lipiński was born in 1888 into the family of a sweet manufacturer. Orphaned at the age of 9, he had received a good education, gravitating in his later schooldays to the PPS-Lewica. Tadeusz Kowalik reports that, during the 1905–7 revolution that had so dramatically affected Kalecki’s family life, Lipiński found in a Warsaw bookshop the first Polish translation of volume I of Marx’s Capital. Unable to get beyond the first chapter, he decided to study economics, first in Leipzig, where he fell under the influence of the French anarcho-syndicalist thinker Georges Sorel, and then in Zurich. He returned to Warsaw in 1913, where he found employment in the exclusive Bank Handlowy w Warszawie.¹ However, the job lacked intellectual stimulation. In the happy phrase of Tadeusz Kowalik, ‘fatigued and exhausted by incessant calculations’ Lipiński resigned to take up a job as a history teacher in a secondary school.²