Leszek Kolakowski Quotes on Politics
Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009), the Polish philosopher whose three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (1976) supplied late-twentieth-century European thought with its most systematic critical history of the Marxist tradition, defended an explicitly anti-utopian political philosophy across the long sequence of essays that followed his 1968 expulsion from the Polish United Workers' Party and his subsequent Western exile. The framework treats the catastrophic twentieth-century political consequences of Marxist utopianism as the working out of philosophical errors internal to the doctrine itself rather than as deviations from a defensible original, and the parallel essays on the inevitability of evil and on the political dangers of the secular religion of humanity articulate the broader case for political modesty.
Quotes
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Attributed to Leszek Kolakowski:
“Total justice is total tyranny.”
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Attributed to Leszek Kolakowski:
“Marxism is the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.”
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Attributed to Leszek Kolakowski:
“Religion remains one of the most fundamental of human cultures.”
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Attributed to Leszek Kolakowski:
“The freedom we lose is rarely the freedom we use.”
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“The Idolatry of Politics", U.S. Jefferson Lecture speech (1986)”
We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are. -
“The Idolatry of Politics", New Republic, 1986-June-16, page 31.”
...shall we say that the difference between a vegetarian and a cannibal is just a matter of taste? -
“Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.”
Main Currents Of Marxism(1978) | New Preface, p. v