Abstract
There has always been a principle of "preserving traditions" as a sine qua non of conservative way of thinking but without further differentiation explaining the reasons why something existing should have been considered as desirable we have to admit that this argument is not sufficient for a scientific classification. Moreover it is necessary to take a dependency of the conservative philosophy on a cultural and geographic environment into account, which means that it is impossible to formulate its universal principle - as Richard Pipes points out, we cannot imagine a similarity of opinions among the French, American and Russian conservatives.
This delimitation of conservatism is even more complicated in the Polish case during the 19th century, because it was absurd to advocate a principle of preserving status quo when there was no status quo anymore and the traditional Polish values were moreover castigated as the causes of the failure of the state. However two distinct political concepts of traditional way of thinking were being formed in the 19th century, whose different interpretation of the Polish identity led to the formulation of the dichotomy between so called "Genuine" and "False" conservatism, which was created by the proponents of the first mentioned stream as an artificial rhetorical means of denunciation.
This proves that it is hard to discover whether an identification of some political movements with conservative tendencies was a real description of their ideas or just a part of political tactics how to defeat opponents. This paper thus aims to assess the ideological differences between both concepts of the Polish traditionalism and also determine if it is conceivable to comprehend them as the parts of broad European conservatism.