The sixth volume of State of Affairs deals with the subject of the engagement of the social sciences. The field of dispute is outlined by the classics: Émile Durkheim in his lecture on value and reality judgements, and Max Weber, whose principle of freedom from valuations is reconstructed by Michał Kaczmarczyk. Interviews with the sociologists Elizabeth Dunn and Zbigniew Krasnodębski show what the combination of scholarship and politics is like in practice. Justyna Kajta presents the challenges faced by a liberal sociologist who studies members of the National Movement. In subsequent texts, the Polish social sciences are critiqued for their kinds of engagement after 1989. Clashes between management thinking and social-theory thinking, between acting and explaining and understanding, between commitment and distance are inevitable: all scholars must somehow take a position in regard to these conflicts.