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Soc (2013) 50:422425DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9681-x
BOOK REVIEW
Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy? Selected Essays
New York: Basic Books, 2013. 352 pp. $28.99. ISBN: 9780465080991
Collin May
Published online: 24 May 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
When a well-known and respected author with a number of literary and scholarly accomplishments to his credit passes away, it is expected that, within a few years of his death, a collection of the authors essays will appear for public consumption. These collections normally include a broad range of his work, spanning his literary career from youth to seniority. In 2009, noted Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, Leszek Kolakowski died at the age of 81 years; in 2013, a collection of his essays appeared under the interrogative title: Is God Happy?
Kolakowski was best known in philosophic circles for his extensive three-volume study of the origins, rise and eventual decay of Marxism in his Main Currents of Marxism published between 1976 and 1978. His intimate familiarity with Marxism, both as a theory, having been educated in Polish universities following World War II, and as praxis, having lived under a Marxist-Leninist regime, left him well-placed to write with authority on the promise and disaster Marxism wrought on the twentieth century.
But for a man like Kolakowski, Marxism alone was too narrow a pre-occupation. It was not simply the thoughts of Marx, nor was it the incarnation of those thoughts in the array of Marxisms that afflicted so many and dazzled many more, that ultimately interested this man of ideas. Marxism was part of the western heritage, it arose, along with fascism, anarchism and socialism, from pressing issues besetting nineteenth century Europe. And despite its presumed passing into history, something of its essence remains deeply imbedded in our western world even today.
It is this sober conviction, that Marxismthe blessings it announced and the evil it deliveredgoes deeper into our
western past and carries on with us into our future endeavors, that gives these essays both their abiding currency and their common focus.
As a collection, the book divides into three sections. The first treats Marxism, socialism, the left and ideology generally. The second focuses on religion, and its companion themeevil. The third section runs the gamut of modern concerns,...