Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
Goodbye to All That?
By Tony Judt
Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown
by Leszek Kolakowski, translated from the Polish by P.S. Falla
Norton, 1,283 pp., $49.95
My Correct Views on Everything
by Leszek Kolakowski, edited by Zbigniew Janowski
St. Augustine's, 284 pp., $32.00
Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde
by Jacques Attali
Paris: Fayard, 537 pp., _23.00 (paper)
Leszek Kolakowski is a philosopher from Poland. But it does not seem quite right—or sufficient—to define him that way. Like Czeslaw Milosz and others before him, Kolakowski forged his intellectual and political career in opposition to certain deep-rooted features of traditional Polish culture: clericalism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism. Forced to leave his native land in 1968, Kolakowski could neither return home nor be published there: between 1968 and 1981 his name was on Poland's index of forbidden authors and much of the work for which he is best known today was written and published abroad.
Review, 4639 words
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