410 PARTIA
autonomy at home conforms exactly to the long 'conciliatory' or 'realist' trend
in Polish politics since the early eighteenth century. On all these points, the new
comrade was but the old patriot writ large. The one thing that was new was the
Party's Marxist-Leninist ideology, a vulgarized Russian version of nineteenth-
century scientific philosophy, imported wholesale from Moscow.
By the time of its adoption in 1948 as the official state ideology,
Marxism-Leninism had attracted very few native exponents. Instead, Polish
Marxism as a whole could only look back to one recognized pioneer, Stanislaw
Brzozowski (1872-1911), and in thirty years of post-war development produced
only two thinkers of stature. One of these, Adam Schaff (b. 1913), was a mem-
ber of the pre-war KPP and, after postgraduate training in Moscow, obtained
the first Chair of Marxism-Leninism at Warsaw University in 1946. His works
are perhaps less noted for their depth of penetration than for the wide variety of
subjects, such as Semantics and Existentialism, to which their author's Marxist
methods were directed.^17 Schaff's junior colleague, Leszek Kotakowski
(b. 1927), passed through the successive stages of youthful recruit, revisionist,
and rebel. Significantly, both Schaff and Kotakowski were eventually purged
from the Party whose ideology they had so fervently proselytized in their early
careers.
Kolakowski was the only philosopher who has ever made a serious attempt
to marry Marxism to the established traditions of the Polish intellectual her-
itage. In this, he was strongly influenced both by the rigorous academic envi-
ronment of the Warsaw Philosophical Faculty, where he rose from student to
professor, and also by traditional Catholicism. Exceptionally amongst post-war
ideologists, he was prepared to respect the principle of his opponents, to rely on
rational argument rather than on bluster and vilification, and to interest himself
in fundamental issues of ethics and religion. Before long, he found himself at the
head of a lone crusade to give Polish Marxism a human face. Kolakowski's
exposition of 'Non-religious Christianity' promised to build the much-needed
bridge between official ideology and the religious beliefs of the masses,^18 whilst
his celebrated essay on 'The Priest and the Jester' struck a doughty blow against
the rhetorical bombast and authoritarian dogma of Party propaganda. 'The
priest is the watchdog of the Absolute,' he wrote, 'the guardian of the cult of
recognised and obvious truths. The jester may circulate in good society, but he
doesn't belong to it and is impertinent to it, and throws doubt on everything that
is obvious.'^19 The overt comparison between Communist and Catholic dogma-
tism caused immense delight in intellectual circles; and the role of court jester
fitted Kotakowski's temper exactly. But his triumph was short-lived. In 1966 he
was expelled from the Party, and in 1968 from the country. Oxford's gain was
Warsaw's loss. Once in exile, Kotakowski rapidly became one of the fiercest and
most principled critics of the ideology to which he had formerly adhered. His