Background
Born in Radom, Poland, on October 23, 1927, he lived in his native land until mid-career.
( Leszek Kolakowskis masterpiece, one of the twentieth c...)
Leszek Kolakowskis masterpiece, one of the twentieth centurys most important books?for the first time in a one-volume paperback. Renowned philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was one of the first scholars to reveal both the shortcomings and the dangers posed by communist regimes. He now presents, for the first time in one paperback volume, his definitive Main Currents of Marxism: A prophetic work, according to the Library of Congress, that provides the most lucid and comprehensive history of the origins, structure, and posthumous development of the system of thought that had the greatest impact on the 20th century.
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( The late Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most influent...)
The late Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. A prominent anticommunist writer, Kolakowski was also a deeply humanistic thinker, and his meditations on society, religion, morality, and culture stand alongside his political writings as commentaries on intellectualand everydaylife in the twentieth century. Kolakowskis extraordinary empathy, humor, and erudition are on full display in Is God Happy?, the first collection of his work to be published since his death in 2009. Accessible and wide ranging, these essaysmany of them translated into English for the first timetestify to the remarkable scope of Kolakowskis work. From a provocative and deeply felt critique of Marxist ideology to the witty and self-effacing In Praise of Unpunctuality to a rigorous analysis of Erasmus model of Christianity and the future of religion, these essays distill Kolakowskis lifelong engagement with the eternal problems of philosophy and some of the most vital questions of our age.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465080995/?tag=2022091-20
(Very few academic philosophers can write about philosophy...)
Very few academic philosophers can write about philosophy in a way that attracts the attention of those outside academia; even fewer can write with equal scholarly competence about something that transcends their narrow academic concerns; much less to have written about philosophy in such a way that it gave such a headache to Communist authorities or the leaders of the Western Left, as Leszek Kolakowski. In his title essay, "My Correct Views on Everything" (Kolakowski's famous rejoinder to E. P. Thompson's "Open Letter to L. Kolakowski"), the former Communist "High Priest" accounts for his apostasy from communism and explains why communism had to fail. Next, in a number of scholarly articles, he explains why communism assumed the pernicious form it had. There are two other sections, on Christianity and Liberal ideologies. Included are also two interviews with the author. Far from believing that the author has "correct views on everything," the reader is likely to be convinced that Kolakowski is right on more than one point. One's rejection of Marxist ideology does not have to lead, Kolakowski implicitly suggests, to the dismissal of the Marxist dream of a world without greed. Being critical of this or that item in the Church's politics should not have to make one reject Jesus's teaching. Finally, being concerned with liberalism's inability to generate moral values should not lead us past the compelling reasons to accept the liberal state as the only viable political alternative both to the follies of the movement in the twentieth century and the dangers of religious theocratic temptations. What Kolakowski offers in his new collection of essays is, in short, a "catechism" for non-ideological Marxists, Catholic Christians, liberals and conservatives alike. Once again, Kolakowski offers his readers pleasure without equal.
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Born in Radom, Poland, on October 23, 1927, he lived in his native land until mid-career.
Owing to the German occupation of Poland (1939-1945) in World War II, he did not go to school but read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his school-leaving examinations as an external student in the underground school system. After the war he studied philosophy at Łódź University. By the late 1940s it was obvious that he was one of the most brilliant Polish minds of his generation, and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University with a thesis on Baruch Spinoza in which he viewed Spinoza from a Marxist point of view.
At a time when most professional philosophers narrowed their interests to technical problems and wrote for other philosophers, Kolakowski broke out of the academic mold, addressing a wide public audience on classical themes of ethics, metaphysics, and religion. At the age of 18 he joined the Communist Party, attracted by the utopian idealism of Marxism and by the Communist opposition to Nazism. Kolakowski soon won a reputation as a Marxist with a sense of irony and a sense of humor at a time (the era of Stalin) when East European Marxists were expected to be grim and single-minded. His independence of mind led him to a precarious position in Poland. As a young professor he became prominent in the "Polish October" of 1956, a movement that after the death of Stalin (1953) sought a more independent style of communism in Poland. Kolakowski wrote a short critique of Stalinism, "What Is Socialism?" Authorities forbade publication in Poland, but the paper circulated widely among students and an English translation appeared in America (The New Leader, February 18, 1959). His speech on the tenth anniversary of the Polish October (1966) led to his expulsion from the Communist Party. In 1968 he lost his professorship at Warsaw, "expelled by authorities for political reasons, " as he explained it. Kolakowski was quickly invited to a sequence of visiting professorships at McGill University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University. In 1970 he became senior research fellow at All Soul's College in Oxford. After 1981 he divided his time between Oxford and the University of Chicago. During his later years in Poland, Kolakowski sought to develop a "Marxist humanism, " endorsing the Marxist dream of justice and combining it with the values of freedom and spirituality denied by most versions of Marxism. Gradually he became more critical of Marxism, especially of its determinism. He came to understand human history as "a process of accumulation of unexpected miracles. " He turned his attention increasingly to questions of ethics, of human nature, and of the human spiritual quest. With increasing fame came many honors both in Europe and in America. Among these were the Peace Prize of the German Book Publishers (1977); the McArthur Fellowship (1983), commonly known as the "genius award"; and the Jefferson Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986), the highest honor the U. S. federal government confers for achievement in the humanities-and never before awarded to a noncitizen of the United States. Kolakowski's thought may be described as an effort of criticism and redirection of the Enlightenment. But he was quite capable of criticizing some of the acts of "democratic" societies-including the requirement that he, when he applied annually for his visa to enter the United States, had to answer the questions whether he had ever been a Communist (which he readily acknowledged), a prostitute, or a drug smuggler.
Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England
(Very few academic philosophers can write about philosophy...)
( Leszek Kolakowskis masterpiece, one of the twentieth c...)
( The late Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most influent...)
(Book by Leszek Kolakowski)
He was aware that the resurgence of traditional religions beginning in the 1976 was often barbarous, and he distrusted the blossoming of religious sects, "some ephemeral, others simply moronic. " Yet he saw these as symptoms of a need. The basic belief in human rights, he argued, was not logically or empirically demonstrable; it can be rooted only in spiritual belief.
He wrote God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, which was published in 1995.
In the turmoil of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of communism, Kolakowski endorsed an "unconditional defense" of democratic civilization against totalitarianism. He advocated a combination, hard to achieve, of democratic freedom and the welfare state.
He saw major movement in European thought as a necessary revolt against "petrified ways of thinking" and a valid skepticism of arbitrary political and intellectual authorities. But, following insights of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, he said that it degenerated into enervating skepticism and moral relativism. Kolakowski would like to see a renewed appreciation of religious mythology. He attacked the "idolatry" of both reason and politics and sought a recovery of the spiritual roots of culture.
In the heritage of the great 17th-century scientist Pascal, he advocated values, hopes, and ideas that could not be scientifically validated.
He soon showed himself to be a restive spirit within an authoritarian ideological context, and he defined himself as a "jester" amid the secular "priests" of authority.
He also became known as a Marxist interested in conversation with people of other political and religious beliefs.
Kolakowski was too independent a thinker to win many disciples.
Quotes from others about the person
An article in the National Catholic Reporter noted "Kolakowski waltzes into the public arena and reminds us, by virtue of forceful and precise arguments, why we need thinkers. "