Polish-born philosopher and writer Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009), like many European intellectuals of his era, began his adult life as a Marxist. As a schoolboy in Poland, he witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto and his father was killed by the Gestapo.
It is hardly surprisingly that, as a young adult he became an enthusiastic supporter of communism and saw it as providing a new and permanent order of peace and prosperity. Very quickly, though, as the inexorable logic of the ideology worked it…
