Three Cheers for Leszek Kolakowski

Leszek Kolakowski, the world-renowned Polish intellectual, died at the age of eighty-one on July 17. This is not another obituary, but an excuse to return to a minor theme of his, which has been occasionally gnawing at my mind for about twenty years.

Kolakowski has an enormous and wide-ranging oeuvre and his academic fame rests mainly on his magisterial three-volume examination (and rejection) of Marxism (Main Currents of Marxism), while his moral and political stature is largely due to his courageous involvement with the liberation of Poland from the Soviet yoke. He was also a devastating and penetrating critic of the bureaucratic and brutal “real existing socialism” behind the Iron Curtain and of the fatuous New Left which he met in the sixties in the West after his expulsion from Poland.

However, if you trawl the internet, you will also find many mentions of a two-page article that first appeared in Encounter in 1978 and also turns up in his Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), entitled “How to be a Conservative/Liberal/Socialist”.

Kolakowski lists core conservative, liberal and socialist beliefs (three short paragraphs for each denomination) which are meant to be, and I believe are, acceptable for conservatives, liberals and socialists. He then blandly, but logically, states that “this set of regulative ideas is not self-contradictory … equivalent to saying that those three particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options”. Kolakowski, clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, writes in the same article about “a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist”.

In an interview with P.S. Zamorano in January this year Kolakowski insisted that the terms conservative, liberal and socialist have lost their meanings. Nevertheless, I appear to be far from alone in taking his beguiling idea seriously.

I first came upon Kolakowski’s argument in a Quadrant article by Martin Krygier (which he later expanded in his article “Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited”, in The Good Society, 2002). Clearly, while Kolakowski’s basic thesis is very attractive, the devil (or rather whole regiments of devils) are in the detail. Two obvious, serious and related problems are the unacceptable baggage which trails (asymmetrically) behind the three ideologies and the presence of purists, fools and fanatics who will, like the poor, always be with us. However, I believe that the most basic problem is that while a suite of widely acceptable core conservative, liberal and socialist beliefs may in fact be reconciled, I doubt if the corresponding tendencies can. In other words, culture wars are not only about ideas, but also about the psychology of the people holding them.

Nevertheless, even if “conservative-liberal-socialism” is an unlikely new starter in the ideological stakes and certainly a very unlikely base for a new mass party, to say nothing of a “mighty new International” there may be some practical advantages arising from people of good will attempting to look at problems from different ideological perspectives and from being able to apply different ideological perspectives as circumstances change with time.

Take for example the common problem of an underperforming school system: the conservatives tend to look for discipline and values, the liberals to transparency, markets and parental choice, while the socialists will throw more money at the problem. A conservative-liberal-socialist perspective could well be helpful in deciding exactly where the actual weakness in the school system lies.

It is not that the hypothetical “conservative-liberal-socialists” will have some novel “hybrid” solutions to offer, but that they will simply be willing to examine specific deficiencies from the three points of view and be willing to re-examine the problem as time passes. 

All this presupposes good will, a commodity in short supply. Nevertheless, the insightful, brief and somehow charming idea of conservative-liberal-socialism is another reason, in addition to his intellect, humanity, irony and a sense of humour, why Leszek Kolakowski well deserves his three cheers.   

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Leszek Kolakowski

How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist

Motto: “Please step forward to the rear!” This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on a tramcar in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist.

A Conservative believes:

1. That in human life there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils are compatible (that is, we can suffer them comprehensively and simultaneously); but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time. A society in which there is no equality and no liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total equality and freedom is not. The same applies to the compatibility of planning and the principle of autonomy, to security and technical progress. Put yet another way, there is no happy ending in human history.

2. That we do not know the extent to which various traditional forms of social life—families, rituals, nations, religious communities—are indispensable if life in a society is to be tolerable or even possible. There are no grounds for believing that when we destroy these forms, or brand them as irrational, we increase the chance of happiness, peace, security or freedom. We have no certain knowledge of what might occur if, for example, the monogamous family was abrogated, or if the time-honoured custom of burying the dead were to give way to the rational recycling of corpses for industrial purposes. But we would do well to expect the worst.

3. That the idée fixe of the Enlightenment—that envy, vanity, greed and aggression are all caused by the deficiencies of social institutions and that they will be swept away once these institutions are reformed—is not only utterly incredible and contrary to all experience, but is highly dangerous. How on earth did all these institutions arise if they were so contrary to the true nature of man? To hope that we can institutionalise brotherhood, love and altruism is already to have a reliable blueprint for despotism.

A Liberal believes:

1. That the ancient idea that the purpose of the State is security still remains valid. It remains valid even if the notion of “security” is expanded to include not only the protection of persons and property by means of the law, but also various provisions of insurance: that people should not starve if they are jobless; that the poor should not be condemned to die through lack of medical help; that children should have free access to education—all these are also part of security. Yet security should never be confused with liberty. The State does not guarantee freedom by action and by regulating various areas of life, but by doing nothing. In fact security can be expanded only at the expense of liberty. In any event, to make people happy is not the function of the State.

2. That human communities are threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so organised that there is no longer room for individual initiative and inventiveness. The collective suicide of mankind is conceivable, but a permanent human ant-heap is not, for the simple reason that we are not ants.

3. That it is highly improbable that a society in which all forms of competitiveness have been done away with would continue to have the necessary stimuli for creativity and progress. More equality is not an end in itself, but only a means. In other words, there is no point to the struggle for more equality if it results only in the levelling down of those who are better off, and not in the raising up of the underprivileged. Perfect equality is a self-defeating ideal.

A Socialist believes:

1. That societies in which the pursuit of profit is the sole regulator of the productive system are threatened with as grievous—perhaps more grievous—catastrophes as are societies in which the profit motive has been entirely eliminated from the production-regulating forces. There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should be limited for the sake of security, and why money should not automatically produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.

2. That it is absurd and hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflictless society is impossible, every existing form of inequality is inevitable and all ways of profit-making justified. The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based.

3. That the tendency to subject the economy to important social controls should be encouraged, even though the price to be paid is an increase in bureaucracy. Such controls, however, must be exercised within representative democracy. Thus it is essential to plan institutions that counteract the menace to freedom which is produced by the growth of these very controls.

So far as I can see, this set of regulative ideas is not self-contradictory. And therefore it is possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist. This is equivalent to saying that those three particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options.

As for the great and powerful International which I mentioned at the outset—it will never exist, because it cannot promise people that they will be happy.