Tributes continue to pour in for Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher and dissident who died last week.
“For decades he has been the symbol and moral authority of a Poland that is spiritually sovereign, that defies enslavement, of a Poland of free thought and unbending soul,” writes Adam Michnik, editor of Gazeta Wyborcza and a communist-era dissident.
“Back then, in the days of darkness and hatred, he was a beacon of intelligence and dignity,” Michnik said.
“He was a defender of tolerance and the fight against all forms of absolutism,” said German social democratic politician Gesine Schwan.
Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, notes that even before 1989, Kolakowski observed that even crushing defeats, as in Hungary in 1956 or Poland in 1981, “represent the stored experience of a nation’s struggle for freedom, which is a foundation upon which future struggles can be waged.”
“What was true for Hungary and Poland can also be true for China and Burma,” he says.
Christopher Hitchens recalls how Kolakowski’s “wit was deployed to puncture every kind of intellectual fraud or imposture.” When Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs said that even the worst socialism was preferable to the best capitalism, Kolakowski replied: “Ah yes, the advantages of Albania over Sweden are self-evident.”
He also cites Kolakowski’s essay, “Hope and Hopelessness”, as the intellectual catalyst for “the patient building of the independent sphere”. Even in a totalitarian state, Kolakowski wrote, independent social groups could gradually expand the sphere of civil society.
The essay inspired the 1970s’ dissident movements that led to Solidarity and to the collapse of Soviet bloc communism in 1989:
The absurdity of the ruling system could be counted on; what was necessary in the meanwhile was the refusal of the lie and the willingness to display civic courage. Many Poles of my acquaintance [writes Hitchens] think of this essay as part of the germination of what became the Workers’ Defense Committee of 1976 and ultimately the Solidarity movement that led to the emergence of something like dual power and a parallel authority in the Poland of the 1980s.
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