“Freedom is always vulnerable and its cause never safe," said Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) Credit: Library of Congress
Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a leading intellectual inspiration to Soviet bloc dissidents and to the Solidarnosc opposition union, died today.
“We have lost a man who rendered remarkable services in the cause of a free and democratic Poland,” the speaker of Poland’s parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski, told deputies who observed a minute of silence in Kolakowski’s memory.
Kolakowski was “well-known without being known well” but his 3-volume Main Currents of Marxism – “magisterial”, said Sidney Hook – was the most comprehensive critique of the ideology of its time and became a standard academic text.
After joining the communist Polish United Workers Party, he became disillusioned and was eventually expelled from the party for his revisionist views, losing his job at Warsaw University as a consequence.
In his essay, ‘Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie’, his observations on Poland’s communist regime after its initial suppression of Solidarnosc have a telling contemporary resonance in the light of events in Iran:
The military dictatorship has temporarily crushed the organized form of this movement but it has failed to destroy the hope. Indeed, the fact that the communist tyranny no longer even tries to assert its legitimacy, and that it has been compelled to appear without ideological disguise, revealing its true nature in acts of naked violence, is in itself a spectacular symptom of the decay of a totalitarian power system.
Exiled in the West, Kolakowski believed that democrats had grown complacent and failed to fully appreciate that liberal pluralism depends not only on democratic institutions, but also “on a belief in their value and a widespread will to defend them.”
“In order to defend itself,” he wrote, “the pluralist order should voice [its fundamental] values ceaselessly and loudly.”
Kolakowski was a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Journal of Democracy. Writing in the journal in 1990, when democratic triumphalism was arguably in full swing, he presciently highlighted continuing threats to democracy, including terrorism and criminal violence, malignant nationalism, religious intolerance and theocratic politics, and a resilient Sovietism that could lead to “political regression” in Russia.
“Freedom is always vulnerable and its cause never safe,” he concluded.
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