Quote of the Day
Part II from David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith.
First, for those of you who will not read the entire piece, an introduction:
A philosopher of exceptional brilliance and moral courage, (Lezsek) Kolakowski had been the intellectual leader of our political generation. Even the titles of his writings –“Responsibility and History,” “Towards a Marxist Humanism”– read like stages of our radical rebirth. By 1968 those stages had come to an abrupt conclusion. When the Czechs’ attempt to provide Communism with a human face was crushed by Soviet tanks, Kolakowski abandoned the ranks of the Left. He did more. He fled — unapologetically — to the freedoms of the West, implicitly affirming by his actions that the Cold War did indeed mark a great divide in human affairs, and that the Left had chosen the wrong side.
Here’s the QotD:
Kolakowski published Main Currents of Marxism, a comprehensive history of Marxist thought, the world view we all had spent a lifetime inhabiting. For three volumes and fifteen hundred pages Kolakowski analyzed the entire corpus of this intellectual tradition. Then, having paid critical homage to an argument which had dominated so much of humanity’s fate over the last hundred years (and his own as well), he added a final epilogue which began with these words: “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.” This struck me as the most personally courageous judgment a man with Kolakowski’s history could make.