Solidarity is a trade union founded in August–September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. Subsequently, it was the first independent union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state; the union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981, representing one-third of the country's working-age population. Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is recognised as having played a central role in the end of communist rule in Poland. In the 1980s, Solidarity was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement, using methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers' rights and social change. Government attempts in the early 1980s to destroy the union through the imposition of martial law and the use of political repression failed. Operating underground, with significant financial support from the Vatican and the United States, estimated to be as much as US$50 million, the union survived and by the latter 1980s had entered into negotiations with the government.

The 1989 round table talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition produced agreement for the 1989 legislative elections, the country's first pluralistic election since 1947. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December 1990, Wałęsa was elected President of Poland. Following Poland's transition to liberal capitalism in the 1990s and the extensive privatization of state assets, Solidarity's membership and influence declined significantly. In the 1970s Poland's government raised food prices; this and other stresses led to a subsequent government crackdown on dissent. The KOR, the ROPCIO and other groups began to form underground networks to monitor and oppose the government's behavior. Labour unions formed an important part of this network. In 1979, the Polish economy shrank for the first time by 2 percent. Foreign debt reached around $18 billion by 1980. Anna Walentynowicz was fired from the Gdańsk Shipyard on 7 August 1980, five months before she was due to retire, for participation in the illegal trade union.

This management decision enraged the workers of the shipyard, who staged a strike action on 14 August defending Anna Walentynowicz and demanding her return. She and Alina Pienkowska transformed a strike over bread and butter issues into a solidarity strike in sympathy with strikes on other establishments. Solidarity emerged on 31 August 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard when the communist government of Poland signed the agreement allowing for its existence. On 17 September 1980, over twenty Inter-factory Founding Committees of free trade unions merged at the congress into one national organization NSZZ Solidarity, it registered on 10 November 1980. Lech Wałęsa and others formed a broad anti-Soviet social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-Soviet left. Solidarity advocated non-violence in its members' activities. In September 1981, Solidarity's first national congress elected Wałęsa as a president and adopted a republican program, the "Self-governing Republic".

The government attempted to destroy the union with the martial law of 1981 and several years of repression, but in the end it had to start negotiating with the union. Roundtable Talks between the government and Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed, in December Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected Prime Minister. Since 1989, Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union, had little impact on the political scene of Poland in the early 1990s. A political arm founded in 1996 as Solidarity Electoral Action won the parliamentary election in 1997, but lost the following 2001 election; as a political party Solidarity has little influence on modern Polish politics. In the year leading up to martial law, Reagan Administration policies supported the Solidarity movement, waging a public relations campaign to deter what the Carter administration had seen as "an imminent move by large Soviet military forces into Poland."

Michael Reisman from Yale Law School named operations in Poland as one of the covert regime change actions of the CIA during the Cold War. Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a senior officer on the Polish General Staff was secretly sending reports to CIA officer David Forden; the Central Intelligence Agency transferred around $2 million yearly in cash to Solidarity, for a total of $10 million over five years. There were no direct links between the CIA and Solidarnosc, all money was channeled through third parties. CIA officers were barred from meeting Solidarity leaders, the CIA's contacts with Solidarnosc activists were weaker than those of the AFL-CIO, which raised $300,000 from its members, which were used to provide material and cash directly to Solidarity, with no control of Solidarity's use of it; the U. S. Congress authorized the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy, the NED allocated $10 million to Solidarity; when the Polish government launched martial law in December 1981, Solidarity was not alerted.

Potential explanations for this vary. CIA support for Solidarity included money and training, coordinated

Hiromichi Tanaka is a Japanese video game developer, game producer, game director and game designer. He was Senior Vice President of Software Development at Square Enix and the head of the company's Product Development Division-3, he is best known as the former lead developer of Final Fantasy XI, Square's first massively multiplayer online role playing game. He oversaw ongoing development of that title and Final Fantasy XIV until late 2010, he worked in a prominent role for earlier single-player games including Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, Threads of Fate, Chrono Cross, the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy III.. In 1983, Tanaka dropped out of Yokohama National University along with Hironobu Sakaguchi to join Square, a newly formed software branch of the Denyuusha Electric Company. Along with Sakaguchi and Kazuhiko Aoki, Tanaka was part of Square's original Planning and Development department. Final Fantasy XIV received a hostile reception from critics and players, was considered a financial disaster for Square Enix.

Three months after its release in 2010, Tanaka was removed from the Final Fantasy XIV team and replaced by Naoki Yoshida. At the Vana'diel Fan Festival 2012, a festival celebrating Final Fantasy XI's 10th anniversary, Tanaka announced his departure from Square Enix due to health reasons. In 2012, Tanaka joined GungHo Online Entertainment as a freelance adviser to the company. Hiromichi Tanaka profile at MobyGames

Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, the College at the University of Chicago. Pippin earned his BA in English from Trinity College in Connecticut, and his Ph. D. in philosophy from Penn State under the direction of Stanley Rosen. Before moving to Chicago, he taught for a number of years in the department of philosophy at UCSD, where he counted Henry Allison and Herbert Marcuse among his colleagues. In 2009 he held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2014 he is PhD honoris causa at Sweden, he resides in Chicago with his wife Joan. Pippin is best known for his work on Hegel, although has published articles and books on Kant, Proust, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Henry James, his 1989 book Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness was a major contribution to Hegel studies. In it Pippin portrays Hegel as a thinker with fewer metaphysical commitments than are traditionally attributed.

Hegel's claims about the "Absolute" and "Spirit" are interpreted in a vein more epistemological than ontological. Much of Hegel's project, in Pippin's reading, is a continuation rather than a reversal of the Kantian critique of dogmatic metaphysics. According to Pippin's non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel, Hegelian "Geist" is not a divine spiritual being, accordingly Hegel's idealism is not a defense of monistic pantheism. According to Pippin, Hegelian "Geist" should be understood as the totality of norms, which according to them, we can justify our beliefs and actions; the important point is that, we cannot justify anything but in such a normative logical space of reasons. So any kind of distinctively human rational cognition and action is not articulatable and so intelligible independent of such norms. In a phenomenological-hermeneutical jargon, these norms constitute a horizon, a perspective in which we can make intelligible anything to ourselves. Additionally, these norms are socio-historically articulated.

Geist is their transformations in human history. Hegel calls different articulations of these norms "shapes of spirit". So Hegelian idealism is not a kind of return to pre-Kantian and pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics, but trying to going beyond Kantian critical project on the one hand, historicist critiques of Kantian transcendental philosophy, on the other, it should be added that, any shape of spirit could collapse under the pressure of internal or external forces which lead to crisis for the authority of those norms. But because of the actual plurality of shapes of spirit any account of human agency, socio-historical is in danger of getting into relativism; these ideas could be attributed to lots of other philosophers, such as Herder, Heidegger and MacIntyre. But according to the non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel there is a distinctive feature of Hegelian approach which can transcend the alleged dilemma of, on the one hand, socio-historical relativism and, on the other hand, returning to dogmatic metaphysics or trans-historical subjectivity: mutual recognition as the condition of free, self-determined and so authentic rational agency.

Such a revisionist reading of Hegel has gained a following inspiring important works by Terry Pinkard, Paul Redding and others, as well as influencing less historically-oriented philosophers of mind such as John McDowell and Robert Brandom. A similar movement to interpret Hegel as a "category-theorist" has been inspired in Germany by Klaus Hartmann. In Pippin's 1991 Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, he develops what he calls a socio-cultural corollary to his 1989 work, he enters the debate on the legitimacy of the modernist project and the possibility of post-modernity. Still claiming to be interpreting Hegel, Pippin tries to defend prosaic bourgeois society. Nonetheless he admits that, attempts to explore why, the dominant high culture of that society has been one of what might be termed self-hatred: he ranges from Flaubert and modernist avant-gardes to the intellectual trends of New Historicism and Derridean deconstructive thought. Speaking, Pippin's argument is that modernity is "never-ending", that it is an attempt to bring greater rational transparency to all of our social practices and that much of the self-hatred of modern high culture is motivated by attempts to bring such transparency to areas where it had not existed.

This process may never be completed but once it is begun, it cannot be stopped. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the'Critique of Pure Reason'. Marcuse: Critical Theory and The Promise of Utopia, eds. R. Pippin, A. Feenberg, C. Webel. MacMillan and Garvey, 1988. Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Hegel on Ethics and Politics, eds. Robert Pippin and Otfried Höffe, Translated by Nicholas Walker, Introduction by Robert Pippin Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, forward by Axel Honneth and H