Main Currents of Marxism

The Founders the Golden Age the Breakdown

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by Leszek Kolakowski

W. W. Norton and Co.

Due/Published August 2005, 1504 pages, cloth

ISBN 0393060543

FROM PHILOSOPHER Leszek Kolakowski, one of the giants of twentieth-century intellectual history, comes this highly influential study of Marxism. Written in exile, this "prophetic work" presents, according to the Library of Congress, "the most lucid and comprehensive history of the origins, structure and posthumous development of the system of thought that had the greatest impact on the twentieth century." Kolakowski traces the intellectual foundations of Marxist thought from Plotonius through Lenin. Lukacs, Sartre and Mao. He reveals Marxism to be "the greatest fantasy of our century . . . an idea that began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism." In a brilliant coda, he examines the collapse of international Communism in light of the last tumultuous decades. "Main currents of Marxism remains "the indispensable book in its field.