He wrote his thesis at the "Institute for the Education of Research Staff" (Instytut Kształcenia Kadr Naukowych), which was attached to the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party and was soon afterwards renamed to "Institute for Social Sciences" (Instytut Nauk Społecznych), whose director at the time was Bronisław Baczko.

[5] Szacki wrote his monumental Historia myśli socjologicznej ("History of Sociological Thought") in Minneapolis and Oxford.

In 1998, he prefaced a book about the Gdańsk-based milieu of Polish liberals edited by the politician Donald Tusk (then a member of the Freedom Union).

In 1994, Szacki published a book on Liberalism after communism (original title Liberalizm po komunizmie), which was translated into English and other languages and received favourable reviews in the West.

[1] Szacki also translated several classic works from English and French into Polish: Some English-language writings by Florian Znaniecki, a pioneering Polish sociologist, as well as Émile Durkheim's classic work Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, Jean-Pierre Vernant's Les origines de la pensée grecque and Marcel Mauss's Sociologie et anthropologie.

As a teenager during World War II, Szacki had helped his mother Barbara Szacka (who was also honoured) hide and support a pregnant Jewish woman named Irena Hollender, who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto.