The Polish historian of philosophy and ideas died today in Oxford. A short obituary is here. He is probably best-known for the three-volume Main Currents of Marxism, which remains an extremely useful reference work for students of the history of Marxist thought. His view that Stalinist terror was (as the obituary puts it) the "logical" outcome of Marx's philosophy probably had most to do with his fame in the U.S., quite apart from the interpretive or philosophical soudness of the view or his arguments for it.
UPDATE 7/21: David Luban (Georgetown) writes with the following charming story about meeting Kolakowski when he taught at Yale many years ago:
Leszek Kolakowski died last Friday at age 81. I’d like to contribute a brief recollection from my graduate student days in the early 1970s, when Kolakowski taught at Yale. Students keenly anticipated his arrival. We knew him through the English translation of his essays, Toward a Humanist Marxism. To those who saw ourselves as part of the New Left, Kolakowski was intensely interesting: a courageous, authentic East European dissident who criticized communism on humanist grounds but still belonged to the left! We were immersed in the New Left Review, the early Marx, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Marcuse, and the first English translations of Habermas; the Grundrisse had just appeared in English; and the philosophical action seemed to be the debate between various versions of Marxism-with-a-human-face--that's where we put Kolakowski--and Althusser’s “death of man” austerities.
By then Kolakowski had left that world behind. Rather than a younger version of Herbert Marcuse (who at the time used to raise his fist and intone “Power to the people!” when he lectured), Kolakowski was an urbane ironist of immense cultivation. He was already immersed in writing his skeptical history of Marxism, and when I had lunch with him he described it as a theological history of heresies and persecutions. “The biggest difficulty in writing it,” he told me, “is making these thinkers sound different from each other.” He smiled. “Really, it’s almost impossible. Not only are they indistinguishable from the Christian sects, they’re nearly indistinguishable among themselves.”
The lunch was personally memorable because (a child of my times) I showed up in typical ‘70s counter-culture costume: bib overalls from Sears, hiking boots, a U.S. Navy hardhat that I had bought for a nickel at a surplus store, and a trenchcoat. Kolakowski stared—his good manners did not permit him to laugh at me—and in embarrassment I began to murmur a few words about how really, the hardhat was very practical…but he cut me off. “No, no, no. You must never apologize for your extravagances.”
ANOTHER: A longer obituary here.
Recent Comments