[lbo-talk] Polish Philosopher Wins $1M Kluge Prize

[andie nachgeborenen]

There was a period in the 60s and early 70s when K was
a sort of New Leftie. He published a series of pretty
good essays that I have collected in a Grove Press
anthology that represent a dissident Marxist view. His
rightward shift was remarked by EP Thompson in
Socialist Register in the mid-70s, see his Open Letter
to LK, reprinted in the Poverty of Theory, in which,
however, Thompson still considered himsrlf to be
discussing a comrade. Nonetheless, even when K finally
broke with Marxism and wrote the work that got him
this prize, Main Currents, he was still a solid and
careful scholar. Main Currents is in the main an
honest, thorough, intelligent, and even fair-minded
discussion of Marxist political philosophy -- it's
rather weak on economic theory. Even at the end of the
final volume, The Breakdown, which LK envisages as
putting the gravestone on Marxism, he still says taht
people who try to deduce the Gulag for Marx's theories
are dumb. But I still don't see the book, or his
whoile career, as worth a million bucks, except as an
ideological statement. He's done nothing at all of
value other than Main Currents since he switched
sides.

jks

--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Jks:
> > WASHINGTON -- Leszek Kolakowski, an anti-communist
> > Polish philosopher at Oxford University in
> England,
> > will receive the first $1 million John W. Kluge
> prize
> > for lifetime achievement in the humanities.
> 
> That is a bit misleading.  Kolakowski was the
> leading Party intellectual
> from 1947 but then fell into disfavor and left the
> country after the
> 1968 student rebellion.  That may explain his
> anti-communist position as
> an émigré - vast majority of Eastern European
> émigrés became rabid
> anti-communists.  
> 
> My explanation of this pattern is pretty much the
> same as I proposed for
> the political attitudes of IT workers a few days ago
> - downward mobility
> produces fascist attitudes.  Most of these EE
> intellectuals were
> virtually gods during their heyday, thanks to Party
> patronage of course,
> so falling into disfavor must have been really hard
> on them.  But unlike
> Boetius who shared the same fate and looked for
> consolation in
> philosophy, these guys used the skill of sycophancy
> they learned in EE
> and tried to regain their privileged position by
> providing the needed
> conclusions to their new masters.  
> 
> Prior to his exile, Kolakowski was a good,
> thoughtful writer, but after
> that his rabidly anti-communist rants were
> unreadable.  I think he is
> somewhat like Heidegger - a few good ideas but a
> political sell-out.
> 
> PS. An excellently sarcastic portrait of the EE
> intelligentsia can be
> found in the novel _The Joke_ by Milan Kundera.
> 
> Wojtek
> 
> 
> 
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>
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