Themes of this stories are the opposition eros/thanatos, old/young, jealousy, the prime impulses of humanity.
His scenery is the Polish countryside with its noblemen and peasantry.
His technique is modern, mingling past and present with flashbacks.
The Birch Grove, for instance, relates in violent terms a live-and-death struggle of two brothers for a girl.
Surprising work.

I have always been skeptical of philosophy books, having been scarred at school and university by their academic pretentiousness. Descartes once wrote: "I am sorry this letter is so long. I did not have the time to make it short" This book is short and concise, yet more profound and well-thought out than the encyclopedic volumes that we all had to plough through. Admittedly, some of the essays are weaker than others. Some are vague, but most are brilliant in their thought and structure. Kolakowski isn't trying to give everybody else's definitions and views on topics. He just writes what he thinks and sometimes, he does miss a point or he doesn't explore a particular issue as much as he could. Nonetheless, this is a very good read and it does provide a valuable guide on how to think and argue about issues

The second volume of "Main Currents of Marxism" examines the doctrine of the leading Marxists, and the controversies between them, in the era of the Second International. At this time there were many interesting varieties of Marxism, and the leading contributors to the debate are all discussed -- Kautsky, Rose Luxembourg, Plekhanov, Lenin and Georges Sorel among them.

Kolakowski, as a Pole and an anti-Marxist from the dark days before Solidarnosc, knows of what he speaks. The whole three-volume set is indispensable to an understanding of how our eraa reached its present state of decadence and dissolution. The two "founders" of Marxism were both contributors to, and symptoms of, that decay.

Twenty-four essays by philosopher Leszek Kolakowksi ( Univ of Chicago / Oxford ) comprise the totality of "MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL", a volume divided into 4 parts:

I."On Modernity, Barbarity and Intellectuals"
II."On the Dilemmas of the Christian Legacy"
III."On Liberals, Revolutionaries and Utopians"
IV."On Scientific Theories"

The book in its entirety is an examination of the ceaseless argumentation among opposing ideas that has propelled and sustained that part of Western Tradition expressed in "the pluralist society". In his brief forward he submits his essays as-

"semi-philosophical sermons in which...to point out a number of unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas that loom up every time we attempt to be perfectly consistent when we think about our culture, our politics and our religious life...these essays are not edifying. They are rather appeals for moderation in consistency..."

True to form, Kolakowksi consistently refuses the knifepoint threat of "either/or" ultimatums, exploring the mutually antagonistic yet symbiotic struggle between tradition and progress. Select quotations from his essays will not do the author justice but may perhaps give some evidence of his train of thought:

"It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms".
( MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL )

"Ultimately we may say the Europe's cultural identity is reinforced by her refusal to accept any kind of closed, finite definition and thus she can only affirm her identity in uncertainty and anxiety... The choice between total perfection and total self-destruction is not ours; cares without end, incompleteness without end, these are our lot. Thus, in the doubt which Europe entertains about herself, European culture can find its spiritual equilibrium and the justification for its pretensions to universality"
( LOOKING FOR THE BARBARIANS )

"It is difficult to protect democracy by democratic means; difficult, but feasible on condition that democracy has the resolute will to defend itself. Tolerance is not necessarily indifference; the pluralist order is obviously founded on the recognition of particular values, and is not 'value free' or neutral; also, the indifference of the law presupposes no neutrality of values; it is anchored in a social philosophy. In order to defend itself, the pluralist order should voice those values ceaselessly and loudly. There is nothing astonishing or outrageous about the fact that within the pluralist society, the defenders and enemies of its basic principles are not treated with exactly the same indifference; it is quite possible to treat them differently without harming citizens' rights or the principle of tolerance. A pluralism that acquired from its own norms carelessness about its existence and made it a virtue would condemn itself to death."
( THE SELF-POISONING OF THE OPEN SOCIETY )

"I admit to speak in defense of the conservative spirit. However, it is a conditional conservative spirit, conscious not only of its own necessity but also the necessity of the spirit which opposes it. As a result, it can see that tension between rigidity and structure and the forces of change between tradition and criticism, is a condition of human life- a thing its enemies are seldom prepared to admit...Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection which could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization- the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself... If it is true that in order to make society more tolerable, we must believe it can be improved, it is also true that there must always be people who think of the price paid for every step of what we call progress. The order of the sacred is also a sensitivity to evil- the only system of reference that allows us to contemplate that price and forces us to ask whether it is exorbitant."
( THE REVENGE OF THE SACRED IN SECULAR CULTURE )

"The general conclusion of these remarks might sound somewhat banal but, not unlike many banalities, worth pondering. It says that the idea of human fraternity is disastrous as a political program but is indispensable as a guiding sign... It is likely that two kinds of mentality- the skeptical and the utopian- will survive separately, in unavoidable conflict. And we need their shaky coexistence; both of them are important to our cultural survival. The victory of utopian dreams would lead us to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilization, whereas the unchallenged domination of the skeptical spirit would condemn us to a hopeless stagnation, to an immobility that a slight accident could easily convert into catastrophic chaos. Ultimately, we have to live between two irreconcilable claims, each of them having its cultural justification.
( THE DEATH OF UTOPIA RECONSIDERED )

In this collection of essays Leszek Kolakowski displays not only intellectual acumen but a certain level of humility expressed in clear, jargon-free thought. And, as a "bonus", the justifiably serious tone of the book is given relief in a couple of parody pieces, which reveal the author's sense of dry humor.

As a contrast to the ( variously valuable ) examples of thinkers along more partisan "conservative/progressive" lines, Kolakowski acts as a kind of "referee", momentarily separating the "combatants" in a contest that, one perceives, were it to cease, no society worth living in would exist.

Kolakowski's Presence of Myth is a stunning reminder that the function of myths in modern daily life is anything but dormant!

This is a very readable book dealing with Husserl's quest for certitude, which made him arrive at phenomenology. The author's insights and explanations are helpful and clear. The fact that the book is fairly brief and that the author writes in a smooth style makes it an easy read.

The book is neatly divided into three parts, "The Ends," "The Means," and "The Achievements." Though I do not agree with everything the author writes, many points are well-taken and help to clarify WHY Husserl engaged in phenomenology, HOW so, and what it all resulted in (and FAILED to result in).

Myself being a critic of Husserl's phenomenological method and its supposed achievements, I very much welcomed Kolakowski's own critical comments towards the end. No doubt, Husserl's search for absolute certainty failed, and it had to, despite his reductions and what he termed "transcendental consciousness." This book makes a nice addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in Husserl's thought or simply the beginning of the phenomenological movement.

This book is a collection of papers, by various authors of a socialist persuasion, presented at a conference in 1973. It is, unsurprisingly, a hugely dated work. The theme of the conference was a critical examination of the prospects for socialism at that time, when the experience of its application - especially, but not only, in eastern Europe - had hardly accorded with the hopes of its adherents.

Nearly 30 years later, it is striking just how little relevance to modern politics the authors' ruminations have. None of them foresaw the breakdown of the Keynesian consensus on the rock of high inflation, or dealt with the information problem inherent in the allocation of scarce resources. Some of the essays are almost comical in their social scientific jargon: an essay on 'Socialism and the Nation', by Peter Ludz, concludes portentously, "In contrast to SED [the East German Communists] internationalism, however, the SPD [the West German Social Democrats] inter-state concept does not derive its internationalism from class theory." It's tempting to attribute this deadly bureaucratic prose to a simple failure to foresee that the only really important historical question that applies to these two parties is that one, the SED, was a totalitarian monstrosity running a police state, while the other, the SPD, is a democratic party adhering to liberal values. Tempting, but too generous to the author: there were many heroic souls throughout the Cold War and across the democratic political spectrum who saw these issues clearly enough, including left-wingers like George Orwell and Sidney Hook.

So far, so turgid. But the real importance of this book, and what makes it well worth pursuing in second-hand bookshops, is an outstanding essay ("The Myth of Human Self-Identity") by the book's co-editor, Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who at that time still considered himself a Marxist. Kolakowski calmly and with a complete absence of polemical tone manages to isolate a crucial reason why the Marxist project has always and everywhere turned bloody when it has had the opportunity to wield power. His argument - which is not an easy read, but then it is a complex point - is that Marxism is rendered totalitarian by its notion of 'the perfect unity of social life'. It is not possible to have more freedom, more equality and more justice (the pronounced ideals of socialism) if at the same time one aims at a unified human society.

Kolakowski's insight, while wholly original, was also wholly consistent with the liberalism of a thinker such as Isaiah Berlin (who made a similar point in his very last essay, published as "The First and the Last") and the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott. Socialism in the sense meant traditionally by the British Labour Party, the Israeli Labour Party or the German Social Democrats is not totalitarian precisely because it values liberty more than it values socialising production (though such economic and social policies have had real costs, as the more orthodox policies pursued by Tony Blair would indicate), but then it is not socialist either. Real socialism of the type advocated by the Marxist left *is* an essentially totalitarian project because of this fundamental flaw.

The principal reason I myself abandoned socialism was because the force of Kolakowski's point was too great to ignore. His point has never been answered, though he has been met with much abuse and accusations of bad faith (notably by the late E.P.Thompson, whom some mistakenly believe to have been an honourable man). It is well worth searching for this essay, as a prelude to Kolakowski's great trilogy "Main Currents of Marxism".