The Jester Turned Prosecutor

I yield to no one in my admiration for Leszek Kolakowski’s past contributions to Marxist “revisionism” and his moving attempt to build a theory of libertarian socialism on the ruins of Soviet orthodoxy. His painstaking dissection of the lies and mendacities of Stalinist and post-Stalinist practice and ideology performed a major therapeutic service in the Eastern bloc and among Western radical intellectuals. But his recent paper on “The Euro-Communist Schism” (Enc...