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“... and altogether incoherent. (Reviewing himself, he adds, he might say the same.) Leach, Hinde and Kolakowski, and Abrams, too, in a sane and often elegant account of how history and sociology connect (divided, Abrams insists, not by logic, only by rhetoric), are all concerned not simply to survey but also to argue. Each, in doing so, provides a splendid ...”

“... in building a murderous system’. But the Polish sociological environment – which included Leszek Kołakowski and Bronisław Baczko – was greatly enlivened by the subsequent thaw. Stanisław Ossowski, a well-known sociologist from the prewar period who had been banned from teaching in 1951, was able to recover his chair, and Bauman’s mentor, Julian ...”

“... of progressives and reactionaries. In a sense, Redondi is being deliberately anachronistic. Since Leszek Kolakowski published his book on Christians without a Church in Warsaw in 1965, I have not seen a study of Early Modern Europe which so insistently demands an allegorical reading (though the translator offers no assistance to readers unfamiliar with ...”

“... observation was demonstrated from an unexpected and influential quarter. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski had made his name as one of the young Warsaw revisionists in the early 1960s, and as such had been commended and approvingly quoted by Bloch. But the three-volume study of Marxism which ...”

“... had one thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, who has attracted the attention of both Helen Waddell and Leszek Kolakowski. The book fails to convey a sense of change in this period, a period that Marc Bloch took as the starting point for his great analysis of Medieval society. With Mr Leyser’s book we enter the authentic world of the early Middle Ages. We ...”

“... anxious to preserve their privileges as they note the rumblings from below. At one point he quotes Leszek Kolakowski on the difference between the priest and the jester: ‘The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of the final and the obvious as acknowledged by and contained in tradition. The jester is he who moves in good society ...”

“... of Williams’s pronouncements on these topics in recent years (for example, on the arguments of Leszek Kolakowski) have been inexcusably haughty and intellectually disingenuous. The judgments themselves are unconvincing and the reasons which he has given for believing them sound are even less convincing. The quest for solidarity, insufficiently ...”

“... says it is. What has sparked Davie’s resistance here is Thompson’s equation, in a letter to Leszek Kolakowski, of Protestantism and scepticism, and of both with Englishness, the habits of the people of ‘an ancient Protestant island, doggedly resistant to the magics of religious symbolism even when they remained believers’. Davie must be right ...”

“... condemned by the Pope. Its vision of our relationship with God is aptly caught by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, in the title of his book about Jansenism: God Owes Us Nothing. During his lifetime the implications of such thinking troubled some of Augustine’s followers. Even if we were able to ignore the pious cruelty, an illogicality stands out: we ...”

“... John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses legitimacy and terrorism, pointing out that the armed struggle of the underground partisans against the Nazi occupation was perfectly legitimate because the rule of the invader had no legitimacy – he refrains from drawing the ...”