by Artur Banaszewski and Jacob Saliba
In 1987, just a few years before the end of the Cold War, Judith Shklar invited the eminent Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski to deliver a lecture at Harvard University. “Do not feel that you are under any pressure to talk about Marxism or any similarly restricted topic”—Shklar assured. By the 1980s, Kołakowski was regarded as a scholarly authority on Marxism. To the surprise of many, he decided to present “Politics and the Devil.” Already in the lecture hall, the audience was left rather confused: the “devil?” in “history?” For most of the lecture, Kołakowski engaged with theological discourses of God and Hell as well as offered interpretations of St. Basil, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and more. Present, that day, at the lecture was an up-and-coming Tony Judt who also struggled to follow the argument. It was not until Timothy Garton Ash leaned over and whispered to him that he realized the point to the lecture: “He really is talking about the Devil.”
Tony Judt recounts this anecdote in Kołakowski’s obituary published in the New York Review of Books in 2009, one year before his own passing. By suggesting that Kołakowski was “the last Central European intellectual,” he was not merely deploring the loss of an eyewitness to Europe’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Judt expressed his esteem for the Polish philosopher and his work on more than one occasion. In his essays, Judt placed Kołakowski alongside key intellectual figures of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus, among others. In Thinking Twentieth Century, his final conversation with Timothy Snyder, Judt remarked that his most influential book, Past Imperfect, was very much written from a “Central European perspective” (212). In Judt’s own words, he considered Kołakowski “an object of unstinting admiration and respect” (198). When writing history, biographies can be as influential as events and ideas—and such was the case with Judt’s reverence for Kołakowski.
To be sure, in Thinking Twentieth Century, Judt also admitted that he never knew Kołakowski very well. The two men first met in Oxford in the early 1980s, when Kołakowski was a fellow of All Souls College; Judt had just begun teaching politics at St Anne’s College. Interestingly, it was Judt’s wife Patricia who arranged their first meeting, as after reading The Main Currents of Marxism Judt felt “quite shy” and “would probably not have asked to meet him” (198). Later, Judt met Kołakowski on numerous occasions—from the Harvard lecture to the so-called Castel Gandolfo Talks organized by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s and 1990s—the last time shortly before his death. Their personal acquaintance was loose, which does not make Kołakowski’s influence on Judt any less relevant or meaningful.
The Polish philosopher seemed to epitomize what Judt regarded as the cardinal virtues of an exemplary intellectual: public engagement, a principled approach to academic inquiry, and an uncompromising rejection of all shades of communism and Marxism. However, what stands out in Judt’s writings about Kołakowski is the recurring emphasis on the uniqueness of his perspective: a public intellectual, an ex-Marxist, a Catholic thinker, and a Pole. This emphasis becomes particularly evident when Judt discusses his personal disengagement with Marxism: “Kołakowski’s perspective—that Marxism . . . merited intellectual attention but was bereft of political prospects or moral value—was to become my own” (197). And yet, the term “perspective” does not fully describe their scholarly affinity, nor the premises behind their most famous intellectual choices. Judt and Kołakowski’s friendship stemmed from a shared perspective on twentieth-century history—above all, to capture and convey its moral and political lessons to guide the post-1989 era.
Although from different worlds, both seemed to live and think in a similar orbit. Judt’s own grandparents had immigrated to London from Eastern Europe. His first major project was on the French Socialist Party. By 1968, while studying in Paris, Judt seemed to come to the same realization as Kołakowski: there was a stark difference between Western ‘fellow traveler’ intellectuals ‘thinking’ communism and those who were actually ‘living it’ behind the Iron Curtain. Over the course of his career, Judt dedicated more than five monographs on the complexities and pitfalls of this historical issue, culminating in Postwar in which he spends over 800 pages trying to debunk the notion that the Soviet experiment was a recoverable model of progress. Ultimately, for him, the empirical evidence for communist success did not seem to add up.
In 1968, Kołakowski also witnessed student protests—albeit on the other side of the Iron Curtain, at the University of Warsaw. Polish students demanding freedom of speech and respect for Marxist ideals were met with police batons of a nominally socialist government. Shortly afterwards, the authorities forced Kołakowski to leave Poland because of his role in inspiring the protesters. In 1969, he arrived at the University of California, Berkeley—at the height of the student protest movement against the war in Vietnam. Having fled repression in communist Poland, Kołakowski was appalled by the left-wing radicalism of American students, which he called “simply barbaric.” The next year, he left for All Souls College, Oxford—to the regret of Martin Jay, who called his short visit at Berkeley “A Missed Opportunity.” For both Judt and Kołakowski, the experience of 1968 strengthened their conviction that Marxism was an irrecoverable intellectual tradition on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
To be sure, Judt and Kolakowski often reduced Marxism to the convenient cliché of Soviet tyranny (though, ironically, they would make the same assertion of reductionism against their critics for defending it). On one level, this is true. They really did argue that the actions of the Soviet Union offered a self-evidentiary rebuttal against any arguments in favor of communism. Yet, on a deeper level, their critique emerged from a particular moment in post-war European history when the abuses of political power could be localized to a specific region of the world. It is not simply that they rejected Marxism but that they rejected it on the basis of its consequences in Eastern and Central Europe. Like their critics, they gazed east-ward with watchful eyes. Whereas left-wing revolutionaries looked to the Eastern Bloc in order to recover the possibility of radical political improvement, Judt and Kolakowski asserted the impossibility of such a model. For them, the Soviet Bloc represented nothing but one of the greatest threats to Western life in the post-war era, namely, the abuse of power.
This conviction was encapsulated in The Main Currents of Marxism from 1976, Kołakowski’s most famous work that Judt termed “the best critique of Marxism ever published” (197). Judt’s memoirs provide further insights into the criticisms of Marxism that he considered particularly valuable. From a distinct intellectual history approach, The Main Currents acknowledges that blaming Marx for the establishment of communist dictatorships in the twentieth century would amount to a prolepsis: the responsibility for communist crimes lies with those who committed it, not with a German philosopher who lived in Victorian London. But as Judt notes in his NYRB essay, the consequence of this assumption is to recognize the futility of the efforts to recover “true” Marxism, untainted by the “errors and distortions” committed after the October Revolution. Because Marx could not have foreseen the future, to search for his “original” intention amounts to little more than reinterpretation through the prism of present political concerns—and cannot redeem the subsequent evolution of his doctrine (6-7). At the same time, Kołakowski contended in the most unequivocal way that Stalinism was not a distortion but a legitimate and conceivable model of Marxism. As he meticulously argues in The Main Currents, the premises behind some of Lenin’s and Stalin’s most horrendous decisions can be logically deduced from Marx’s writings—from the “Marxist-Romantic theory of unity” to Hegelian historical determinism (343, 790). Consequently, Kołakowski’s book contested one of the key assumptions of “Western” Marxist intellectuals and fellow travelers: that Marx’s thought could be separated from its implementation in the Eastern Bloc, and that Soviet communism was a flawed yet pioneering attempt to construct a new social system. For Judt, who was “inculcated since childhood” with the distinction between Marxist theory and Soviet reality, this was a groundbreaking revelation that sealed the change in his views (76-77). It is no exaggeration to say that Judt definitively rejected Marxism after reading Kołakowski’s book (197-198).
The persuasiveness of The Main Currents lies in the fact that, although it is “unashamedly a narrative of ideas,” it addresses the most pressing, practical problems of post-war left-wing politics. Ultimately, however, The Main Currents is about moral judgment. Kołakowski leaves no doubt: the Marxist legacy is unredeemable, and continuous support for the communist idea after witnessing its disastrous outcomes in the twentieth century amounts to monumental dishonesty. Therein lies perhaps the most notable reason for Judt’s admiration for Kołakowski. With his dissident biography and principled anti-communist convictions, the Polish philosopher constituted a living antithesis to “Western” communist intellectuals and fellow travelers, for whom Judt held a special contempt. In sharp contrast with Marxist academics like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, Kołakowski did not refuse to “stare evil in the face and call it by its name.” Quite the opposite, he was ready to depict evil at length and pass moral judgment on it, as he did in response to E.P. Thompson’s Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski—which Judt tellingly termed “the most perfectly executed intellectual demolition in the history of political argument.” In his New York Review of Books essay, Judt almost seems to suggest that Kołakowski had falsified the British Communist Party Historians’ Group’s findings on twentieth-century history with his biography alone.
In some respects, Judt’s and Kolakowski’s apprehension is part of a larger Cold War tradition that saw a dangerous failure in the revolutionary Left for remaking the present without honestly looking back to the politics of the past. Some have argued that this Cold War mentality amounted to a “liberal distrust of the populace,” exemplified by major powers adopting strict security measures against groups who gave whiffs of revolutionary fervor (301). Judt, however, actually took his stand for the opposite reason. It was the state—not ordinary citizens—that was the problem; and very often, to him, the two clashed over the implementation of utopian ideals at the fatal expense of the day-to-day citizen. Where Judith Shklar posits a framework of “common and immediate experience” to defend liberalism (“The Liberalism of Fear,” 32), Judt would point to the Iron Curtain to indict communism. On one level, as Jan-Werner Müller has observed (especially in the case of Shklar), this point of view is predisposed to the primacy of memory, that is, to ‘past humiliation, cruelty, and exile’ (48). Thus, Judt’s position parallels John Connelly’s From Peoples into Nations in which Connelly argues that this part of the world embodies a unique trans-generational memory—a “crisis frame”—that does not easily forget the centuries of turbulence which have shaped it. When we assume that the primary characteristic of Central and Eastern Europe is fear of “existential threat” and “extinction,” we can see how such a conceptualization of the region’s history ties into Shklar’s “liberalism of fear.” On a more ideological level, following Arendt, Judt also justifies the identification of communism with nazism under the concept of totalitarianism.
In a commentary published in New Left Review shortly after Judt’s passing, Dylan Riley pointed out that although Judt styled himself as an “East Europeanist,” he did not have a comprehensive understanding of the region and its history. Judt never wrote a monograph about Eastern or Central Europe. Even his monumental Postwar reiterates the idea of incorporating the East into a pan-European history more as a postulate than a realization; with the notable exception of the revolutions of 1989, it remains centered on Britain, France, and Germany. And yet, Riley’s charge does not invalidate the significance Judt prescribed to Europe’s eastern half in his broader outlook on the lessons of the twentieth century. That significance was best captured by his comment in Thinking Twentieth Century, where he claims that “by the 1970s the most interesting liberal thought was in Eastern Europe” (232). According to Judt, the “Central European lesson” for the rest of the continent—and the world—was to reaffirm the veracity of “liberalism of fear:” the uneasy recognition that “Evil . . . is not contingent . . . but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.” In sharp contrast with intellectuals from Western Europe who, by the 1980s, were beginning to displace the political catastrophism of earlier decades, the dissidents fleeing persecution in the Eastern Bloc served as a living reminder of the ever-present possibility of summum malum (204). Thus, Judt’s interest in the region stemmed from his appreciation of the particular version of liberalism prevalent among some East European—mostly Czech and Polish—intellectuals towards the end of the Cold War. Kołakowski was the most prolific figure of such a defined East European liberalism: a man who had first-hand experience of living under both Nazism and Stalinism, and who recognized the Devil as a key political actor long before his memorable 1987 Harvard lecture.
Whether we agree or not that Judt can be reduced to a “self-styled heir” of the Cold War liberals (171), it is hard to deny that he offered one of the most compelling defenses of that strand of the liberal tradition after 1989. A liberal reinterpretation of the twentieth-century history of Central Eastern Europe was instrumental in conceiving that line of defense—and was profoundly influenced by the life and work of Leszek Kołakowski. Today, however, that shared legacy of the two scholars involves exigent challenges. Neither Judt nor Kołakowski ever explicitly explained why of all the regions that suffered misfortune, misery, and yoke in the twentieth century it is Central Eastern Europe that holds particularly relevant lessons for the entirety of the globe. Indeed, the basic premise of the “East European perspective” that Judt praised in Kołakowski’s work is that it was more preoccupied with the threat posed by communist regimes than with the political divisions and social struggles in other parts of the world—including in the democratic “West.” It should be asked whether this type of East European liberalism can offer any insights into the problems of contemporary democratic politics beyond seeking the same seeds of tyranny and totalitarianism that afflicted the region in the twentieth century. Judt himself seems to have been increasingly aware of this question towards the end of his life. And even Kołakowski remarked in his 1987 lecture, “If the present phase closes with the devil’s designs being frustrated, he will certainly be clever enough to open up new avenues for his energy.”
Judt continues to have a large influence on scholarship today. Upon his passing in 2010, the mark of his work was recalled by leading historians such as Julian Bourg, Judith Friedlander, Peter Gordon, Ethan Kleinburg, Samuel Moyn, and Robert Zaretsky. Beyond his wide academic impact, Judt also held the admiration of famed African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Indeed, between the academic and public spotlights, he was a force to be reckoned with. He relished debate and was determined to ‘think out loud’—both figuratively and literally, as his wife would recount in his final days. The Cold War may have ended, but as Judt and Kołakowski remind us, its lessons continue to be our lessons, too.
Artur Banaszewski is a PhD researcher in the Department of History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Jacob Saliba is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where he studies modern European intellectual history with a focus on twentieth century French thought.
Featured Image: Street demonstrations and police actions in Poland during the martial law of 1981-1983, via Wikimedia Commons.
