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” (Encounter, August 1977), written at Oxford, where he now teaches as an exile from his native Poland, seems to me quite mistaken. What I find objectionable, indeed grating, is not only the content of the essay but the mode of argumentation. Kolakowski, who in his revisionist period wrote in praise of jesters and gadflies to the powers to be, here reverts to a schoolmasterly, even inquisitorial style that he must have acquired in the orthodox days of his youth.

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