Polish Hegelians – Between Marxism and Dissidence
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Positioning
Poland held a special place in the Eastern Bloc. Polish Marxism was less dogmatic than the Soviet variety, the Catholic Church was a power factor, and intellectuals had more room to maneuver. In this constellation, an independent reception of Hegel developed, oscillating between Marxism and dissidence.
11.3.1 Tadeusz Kroński: The Orthodox Beginning
Tadeusz Kroński (1907-1958) was the first significant Polish Hegel scholar after 1945. His Hegel (1961, posthumous) was still shaped by orthodox Marxism: Hegel as forerunner of Marx, dialectics as method, idealism as the limit that Marx overcame.
But Kroński was also the teacher of a generation that would go beyond him. His seminar in Warsaw produced philosophers who left dogmatism behind – among them Leszek Kołakowski.
11.3.2 Leszek Kołakowski: From Marx to Hegel and Back
Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009) is the internationally best-known Polish philosopher of the twentieth century. His path led from orthodox Marxism through revisionism to fundamental critique – and finally to emigration.
In the 1950s, Kołakowski was a convinced Marxist. In the 1960s, he became a revisionist – he still believed in the reformability of the system. In 1966 he was expelled from the party. In 1968, after the Polish government’s antisemitic campaign, he emigrated – first to Montreal, then to Oxford, where he taught until his death.
His main work, Main Currents of Marxism (1976-1978), is the most comprehensive history of Marxist thought. Hegel plays a central role in it – as the source of Marx’s dialectic, but also as the source of its problems.
Kołakowski’s thesis: Marx took from Hegel the idea that history has a meaning, that contradictions resolve themselves, that reconciliation is possible. But he also took over Hegel’s tendency toward totalization – the idea that a single principle (spirit, for Hegel; economics, for Marx) explains everything. This totalization leads to totalitarianism: whoever can explain everything can also justify everything.
This is a fundamental critique – not only of Marx, but also of Hegel. Kołakowski became a skeptic: grand systems are dangerous, dialectics can prove anything and nothing, philosophy should be modest.
The Main Currents as an Interpretation of Hegel
Volume I of the Main Currents bears the title The Founders – but the actual founder Kołakowski analyzes is not Marx, but Hegel. The first 150 pages are one of the most incisive accounts of Hegel in the twentieth century – written by someone who considers Hegel dangerous.
Kołakowski’s picture of Hegel is complex. He acknowledges: Hegel was the first to grasp the historicity of thought itself. Before Hegel, truth was considered timeless – after Hegel, it is clear that even categories develop. This is a lasting insight.
But Kołakowski also sees the danger: Hegel’s “cunning of reason” justifies the suffering of individuals in the name of the whole. The dialectic can integrate anything – even evil, even failure, even terror. If everything is “sublated,” there is no longer any real tragedy, no irrevocable losses, no guilt that cannot be forgiven.
The systematic point: Kołakowski reads Hegel through the experience of Stalinism. He has seen how “dialectical thinking” could justify any murder – as a “necessary moment” of history. This experience shapes his interpretation. It makes him perceptive to the dangers – but possibly also blind to the resources Hegel offers against such abuse.
The Late Position: The Priest and the Jester
Kołakowski’s famous essay “The Priest and the Jester” distinguishes two intellectual types. The priest guards orthodoxy, defends the system, suppresses doubt. The jester questions everything, mocks, respects no authority.
Kołakowski argues for the jester – but he also knows the jester’s limits. The jester can criticize, but not build. He can expose, but not connect. A society made up only of jesters would be just as dysfunctional as one made up only of priests.
This is a position that follows Hegel while also correcting him. Hegel wanted to be both – priest of the Absolute and jester who shows all finite positions in their limitedness. Kołakowski says: that is impossible. One must choose. And after the experiences of the twentieth century, the jester is the wiser choice.
The Impact: The Most Influential Book on the Hegel-Marx Connection
The Main Currents were translated into all major languages. For an entire generation of Western intellectuals – especially in the United States and Britain – Kołakowski was the authority on the question of how Hegel and Marx are connected.
This had consequences. Kołakowski’s skeptical reading helped shape the Anglophone image of Hegel in the 1980s. Anyone who read the Main Currents learned: Hegel is brilliant, but dangerous. The dialectic is a double-edged sword. Grand systems lead to grand catastrophes.
This reading is not wrong – but it is one-sided. Kołakowski read Hegel as a forerunner of Marx, and Marx as a forerunner of Stalin. The other line – from Hegel through the Right Hegelians to liberal democracy – was shortchanged. The book is a monument of critique, but not a balanced account.
11.3.3 The Warsaw School of the History of Ideas
Excursus: The Lvov-Warsaw School of Logic – A Forgotten Background
Before we look at the Warsaw School of the history of ideas, an older tradition must be mentioned that was significant for analytic philosophy as a whole: the Lvov-Warsaw School of Logic.[1]
This school, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938) in Lvov and further developed in Warsaw by Jan Łukasiewicz (1878-1956), Stanisław Leśniewski (1886-1939), Alfred Tarski (1901-1983), and Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886-1981), had enormous influence on the formal logic of the twentieth century.
Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory of truth (1933) – “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white – became the standard formulation in analytic philosophy. Jan Łukasiewicz developed many-valued logics – systems with more than two truth values – which prepared the ground for Gotthard Günther’s work (-> Chapter 22.2).
For the reception of Hegel, this school is paradoxically relevant: it was extremely critical of Hegel. Łukasiewicz called Hegel’s logic “illogic,” Tarski was interested only in formal systems. Polish logic defined itself, so to speak, through rejection of the speculative German tradition.
And yet: the many-valued logics (Łukasiewicz) and the semantic reflection on language and metalanguage (Tarski) created tools with which Hegelian structures could later be formalized. Günther’s formalization of the dialectic would not have been possible without Łukasiewicz. The irony: the school that rejected Hegel most sharply supplied the technical means for his rehabilitation.
The Warsaw School of the History of Ideas (Continued)
Alongside Kołakowski, a school of the history of ideas developed in Warsaw that took up Hegelian motifs without explicitly invoking Hegel.
Bronisław Baczko (1924-2016) worked on the history of the Enlightenment and utopia. His book Lumières de l’utopie (1978) analyzes how Enlightenment ideas can turn into totalitarian projects – a question that Adorno and Horkheimer also asked. Baczko does not share their relation to Hegel, but the problem is related.
Krzysztof Pomian (b. 1934) developed a “philosophy of history without a philosophy of history” – an attempt to save historical thought without falling into Hegel’s teleology. His work on L’Ordre du temps (1984) examines how different cultures structure time – without positing a hierarchy.
The Warsaw School shows: one can learn from Hegel without becoming a Hegelian. The historicity of thought, the dialectic of Enlightenment and terror, the question of the meaning of history – all of these are Hegelian themes, even when they are turned against Hegel.
11.3.4 Systematic Significance
The Polish reception of Hegel shows a different path out of dogmatic Marxism than the Budapest School. While Heller and Fehér arrived at a revised anthropology, Kołakowski arrived at skepticism. Both paths are legitimate – both are reactions to the same experience: that the claim to total knowledge can lead to total terror.
For our account, Kołakowski is important as a warning: the dialectic is no magic formula. It can enlighten, but it can also obscure. It can liberate, but it can also justify. It depends on how one uses it – and whether one is willing to acknowledge its limits.
Kołakowski and Patočka represent two paths out of totalitarianism:
Kołakowski’s path: Skepticism. Grand systems are dangerous, dialectics can be abused, philosophy should be modest. This leads to a liberal, pluralistic position – but also to a certain resignation. If all grand narratives are suspect, what remains?
Patočka’s path: Negative philosophy of history. History has no guaranteed meaning, but it has moments of truth – in the shock, in the confrontation with death, in the solidarity of those who know that orders are fragile. This is more existential, more demanding – but also harder to institutionalize.
Both paths are answers to the experience that Hegel’s thought of reconciliation can be abused. Both are right – and both miss something. Kołakowski misses that skepticism alone gives no orientation. Patočka misses that shock alone cannot ground an order.
The task for a contemporary Hegelianism would be: to take up the legitimate critique without falling into skepticism or pure negativity. That is the task we will take up in the concluding chapter of this volume.
On the Lvov-Warsaw School: Jan Woleński, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Woleński is himself a late representative of this tradition. ↩︎