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Jakub Karpiński (1945–2003) was an outstanding Polish methodologist, conducting research in the field of epistemology of the social sciences within the paradigm of the Lvov-Warsaw school of philosophy. At the same time he became one of the first historians and sociologists of the communist system in Poland. His book Ustrój komunistyczny w Polsce (The Communist Regime in Poland) was his sociological opus magnum. The aim of this paper is to explore his sociology project which has been divided into three aspects: rhetoric, epistemology and ontology. It examines the social and cognitive reasons for the fact that Karpiński’s research programme never became progressive in accordance with Imre Lakatos’s seminal concept. The author raises the question: why didn’t brilliant methodologist become an equally bright empirical researcher?