Artur Banaszewski and Jacob Saliba over at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog:
In 1987, just a few years before the end of the Cold War, Judith Shklar invited the eminent Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski to deliver a lecture at Harvard University. “Do not feel that you are under any pressure to talk about Marxism or any similarly restricted topic”—Shklar assured. By the 1980s, Kołakowski was regarded as a scholarly authority on Marxism. To the surprise of many, he decided to present “Politics and the Devil.” Already in the lecture hall, the audience was left rather confused: the “devil?” in “history?” For most of the lecture, Kołakowski engaged with theological discourses of God and Hell as well as offered interpretations of St. Basil, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and more. Present, that day, at the lecture was an up-and-coming Tony Judt who also struggled to follow the argument. It was not until Timothy Garton Ash leaned over and whispered to him that he realized the point to the lecture: “He really is talking about the Devil.”
Tony Judt recounts this anecdote in Kołakowski’s obituary published in the New York Review of Books in 2009, one year before his own passing. By suggesting that Kołakowski was “the last Central European intellectual,” he was not merely deploring the loss of an eyewitness to Europe’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Judt expressed his esteem for the Polish philosopher and his work on more than one occasion. In his essays, Judt placed Kołakowski alongside key intellectual figures of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus, among others. In Thinking Twentieth Century, his final conversation with Timothy Snyder, Judt remarked that his most influential book, Past Imperfect, was very much written from a “Central European perspective” (212). In Judt’s own words, he considered Kołakowski “an object of unstinting admiration and respect” (198). When writing history, biographies can be as influential as events and ideas—and such was the case with Judt’s reverence for Kołakowski.
More here.
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