Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism by Roger Kimball

Link: Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism by Roger Kimball.

You can't beat Kolakowski for his history and analysis of Marxism. Kimball significantly notes, from Kolakowski's preface to the new edition of his Main Currents of Marxism, that the third volume has never been printed in France (probably because he says mean things about Sartre and Althusser's admiration of Stalin).

Best of all is the Polish thinker's admonition about the techno-cultural (modern industrialism) for which he will be remembered in the future, quoted at the end of Kimball's article:

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization -- the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

Of course, I am quite willing to deny man's total automony, as the Church has long been in the business of making this impolite denial for some time. But in denying autonomy, man himself is not denied. Instead, it is in the denial of autonomy and the embrace of the sacred that man is restored and fulfilled.