“Rosa Luxemburg is an outstanding example of a type of mind that is often met with in the history of Marxism and appears to be specially attracted by the Marxist outlook. It is characterized by slavish submission to authority, together with a belief that in that submission the values of scientific thought can be preserved. No doctrine was so well suited as Marxism to satisfy both these attitudes, or to provide a mystification combining extreme dogmatism with the cult of "scientific" thinking, in which the disciple could find mental and spiritual peace. Marxism thus played the part of a religion for the intelligentsia, which did not prevent some of them, like Rosa Luxemburg herself, from trying to improve the deposit of faith by reverting to first principles, thus strengthening their own belief that they were independent of dogma.”

—  Leszek Kolakowski

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age, pp. 94-5

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Rosa Luxemburg is an outstanding example of a type of mind that is often met with in the history of Marxism and appears…" by Leszek Kolakowski?
Leszek Kolakowski photo
Leszek Kolakowski 45
Philosopher, historian of ideas 1927–2009

Related quotes

Jawaharlal Nehru photo

“It was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)
Context: Russia apart, the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me. The Marxist interpretation threw a flood of light on it... It was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me. p. 362-363

Zeev Sternhell photo

“Like all self-respecting revolutionaries, Mussolini considered himself a Marxist. He regarded Marx as the ‘greatest theoretician of socialism’ and Marxism as the ‘scientific doctrine of class revolution.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 197

“Marxism disguises itself as science and owing to this it is easier for Marxism to portray the existing society as acting on the basis of scientific laws of his history, to portray the leadership’s selfishness and idiocy as ingenious scientific foresight etc.”

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

On the Social State of Marxism (1978)

Leszek Kolakowski photo

“In 1903 there appeared Problems of Idealism, a collection of essays many of whose authors had recently been Marxists, but which condemned Marxism and materialism for their moral nihilism, contempt of personality, determinism, and fanatical pursuit of social values regardless of the individuals who made up society; they also attacked Marxism for its uncritical worship of progress and sacrifice of the present to the future.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age, pp. 420-1

Mao Zedong photo

“People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well - they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kind of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Combat Liberalism (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 自由主义者以抽象的教条看待马克思主义的原则。他们赞成马克思主义，但是不准备实行之，或不准备完全实行之，不准备拿马克思主义代替自己的自由主义。这些人，马克思主义是有的，自由主义也是有的：说的是马克思主义，行的是自由主义；对人是马克思主义，对己是自由主义。两样货色齐备，各有各的用处。这是一部分人的思想方法。

Jawaharlal Nehru photo

“Marx may be wrong in some of his statements, or his theory of value; this I am not competent to judge. But he seems to me to have possessed quite an extraordinary degree of insight into social phenomena, and this insight was apparently due to the scientific method he adopted. This method, applied to past history as well as current events, helps us in understanding them far more than any other method of apporach, and it is because of this that the most revealing and keen analysis of the changes that are taking place in the world today come from Marxist writers. It is easy to point out that Marx ignored or underrated certain subsequent tendencies, like the rise of a revolutionary element in the middle class, which is so notable today. But the whole value of Marxism seems to me to lie in its absence of dogmatism, in its stress on a certain outlook and mode of approach, and in its attitude to action. That outlook helps us in understanding the social phenomena of our own times, and points out the way of action and escape.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)

“The firmest proof that Marxism is not science but an ideology is Marxism’s attitude to the experience of the real communist (or socialist) societies.”

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

On the Social State of Marxism (1978)

“A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 224; Partly cited in: Book review http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2040&context=lalrev by Harold G. Wren, in Louisiana Law Review, Vol 13, nr 4, May 1953
1950s
Context: A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.

Fidel Castro photo

“It is necessary that each Marxist-Leninist understand that he can contribute to Marxism-Leninism with an atom of his experience, that every solution he finds, every experience he acquires, in the act of solving a problem, will be one more experience with which he enriches Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism has been enriched so much precisely by the experience of millions and millions of Marxist-Leninists acting in the reality of life.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (20 December 1961) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f201261e.html

Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“It is important to recognize that racism was in origin a scientific doctrine. Whenever a scientific doctrine is discarded, as witness the idea of the acquired inheritance of environmental influences, the old scientific doctrine, as it lingers on in popular thought, is blamed on religion or popular superstition!”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

Related topics