Leszek Kołakowski citations

Leszek Kołakowski, né le 23 octobre 1927 à Radom et mort le 17 juillet 2009 à Oxford, est un philosophe, historien des idées et essayiste polonais. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. octobre 1927 – 17. juillet 2009
Leszek Kołakowski: 45   citations 0   J'aime

Leszek Kołakowski: Citations en anglais

“Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country.”

"My Correct Views on Everything" (1974)
Contexte: When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".

“Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.”

Epilogue, p. 1206
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978)
Contexte: Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled.

“Lenin’ s article of 1905, "Party Organization and Party Literature", was used for decades, and is still used, to justify ideologically the enslavement of the written word in Russia. It has been argued that it refers only to political literature, but this is not so: it relates to every kind of writing. It contains the words: "Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘ a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class" (Works, vol. 10, p. 45). For the benefit of "hysterical intellectuals" who deplore this seemingly bureaucratic attitude, Lenin explains that there can be no mechanical levelling in the field of literature; there must be room for personal initiative, imagination, etc.; none the less, literary work must be part of the party’ s work and controlled by the party. This, of course, was written during the fight for "hourgeois democracy", on the assumption that Russia would in due course enjoy freedom of speech but that literary members of the party would have to display party-mindedness in their writings; as in other cases, the obligation would become general when the party controlled the apparatus of state coercion.”

pg. 515
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

“Thus, as [Karl] Kautsky wrote in 1919, there was growing up amid despotic conditions a new class of bureaucratic German exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks; and the workers’ future struggle against tyranny would be even more desperate than under traditional capitalism, when they could exploit divergences of interest between capital and the state bureaucracy, whereas in Bolshevik Russia these two had coalesced into one. This kind of regimented socialism could only maintain itself by denying its own principles, which it was most likely to do, given the Bolsheviks’ notorious opportunism and the ease with which they changed their tune from one day to the next. The most probable result would be a kind of Thermidor reaction which the Russian workers would welcome as a liberation, like the French in 1794. The original sin of Bolshevism lay in the suppression of democracy, abolition of elections, and denial of the freedom of speech and assembly, and in the belief that socialism could be based on a minority despotism imposed by force, which by its own logic was bound to intensify the rule of terror. If the Leninists were able to keep their "Tartar socialism" going long enough, it would infallibly result in the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in the autocratic rule of a single individual.”

pg. 51
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

“It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary — we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.”

Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze
Original: "Otóż przeciwnie – to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia."

“…shall we say that the difference between a vegetarian and a cannibal is just a matter of taste?”

"The Idolatry of Politics", New Republic, 1986-June-16, page 31.

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