Word: kolakowski
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...installed in every socialist country, with the exception of the social democracies. This has prompted deep self-searching by many socialists. Says Asoka Mehta, India's leading socialist thinker: "Socialism is an attractive goal, but concentration of power is as dangerous as concentration of capital." Oxford Research Fellow Leszek Kolakowski, a dedicated socialist who left Poland in 1968, says, "One cannot discuss the socialist idea today as if nothing has happened since the idea was born. [In Eastern Europe] we expropriated the owners, and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history...
...book The Key to Heaven and Conversations with the Devil, Kolakowski brings dialectical reason and Marxist exegesis to bear on such unsuspecting material as the ass of Balaam, the quarrel over Job, and Martin Luther's argument with the devil in the bathroom mirror. Ostensibly a hodge-podge of theological quibbles, the book sews its cases in point together with the strong thread of a sophisticated socialist ethics, and a delightful sense of both the fun and sometimes the necessity of playing havoc with the party line...
...first section of the book, a set of biblical tales retold, Kolakowski puts the original ambiguities into the Marxist-Leninist idiom. While this sounds reductionist, the effect is quite the reverse. Kolakowski is so faithful to and concerned with the problematic paradox of Hebraic legend that he exaggerates the difficulties to the point where, for sheer ambivalence, his tales rival even the parables of Kafka. Translated into the lingo of current ideological strife, the Old Testament acquires an applicability most have long given up suspecting. To take his own best illustration, Kolakowski turns the story of Jacob and Esau into...
...book the author adopts a variety of personae, from Orpheus to Luther to Satan himself, to demonstrate both the range and limitations of dialectical argument. In a mock soliloquy titled "Shorthand Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference Given by the Demon in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963," Kolakowski impersonates Satan in a remarkable exhibition of incontestable sophistry; he argues for his own existence in a discredulous age along the lines that his very strength lies in the fact that he does not exist. In other soliloquies, notably in one given by Abelard's Heloise in defense of the flesh...
Nonetheless, from this brief but far-reaching display of capsulated argument, Kolakowski gives every appearance of deserving his growing reputation. As if the effort to relativize Moscow's dictates to the Communist conscience weren't enough, a Marxist with a sense of humor ought to be heard. Kolakowski is more serious, and for that reason, funnier than the ideological comedians this country has to offer...