“How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist”—Leszek Kołakowski
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| Leszek Kołakowski (Source) |
Update: 21 September 2025
I posted the following short piece on 6 November 2024, the day after Donald Trump won the 2024 US election, and I leave what I wrote then wholly unchanged (although I do add a video of an interview with Kołakowski conducted in English in 1987, because it indicates clearly how past times are rhyming strongly with our own, particularly in Trump’s America and countries in Europe such as Hungary and Serbia). But I repost it today for two reasons. The first is that my concerns (and the concerns of many, many others) expressed only ten months ago have proven to be correct. The second is, as the Belgian author David Van Reybrouck writes, that following the heinous murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump et al. are using it as its “Reichstag Moment”, that is to say a moment to sow mutual mistrust, and potentially violent division, between those with generally conservative, liberal and socialist dispositions. As I wrote a couple of days ago, frankly, this scares me to my core here in the UK, not least of all because, as the old adage has it, “when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold.”
This increasingly dangerous dynamic led me, a few years ago, to begin seriously to reconsider the merits of Leszek Kołakowski’s (1927-2009) hoped for “mighty International” that was able to conjoin the Conservative, Liberal and Socialist dispositions, not simply in an International, but in individuals themselves. He wrote about this in a 1990 essay called, “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” which is reproduced below, following my opening words from November 2024. Do please give Kołakowski’s humane, eirenic idea a chance . . .
—o0o—
Original Post Published on 6 November 2024
About an hour ago, I woke up to the news that Donald Trump seems to have won the 2024 US election. Not surprisingly, it’s a result that horrifies me, not least of all because it’s a clear indication of the failure and collapse of a certain kind of liberal democratic politics, and also the rise of identitarian politics of both leftist (aka “woke”) and rightist kinds, all of which continually cuts against the possibility of creating solidarity between people of different kinds. Just to be clear for any American readers of this blog, it’s a collapse that is also increasingly being seen in the UK (where I live) and across Europe generally. This collapse inevitably raises the question of what kind of political movement/position might be able to resist the kind of anti-democratic politics espoused by Trump and the MAGA movement, as well as those other authoritarian, nationalist (sometimes ethno-nationalist), protectionist and populist leaders elsewhere. Of course, I don’t pretend to know the answer to this for sure, but I do have a strong sense that it’s likely to be something like “the mighty International” that the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), feared would never exist. He wrote about his hoped for mighty International in an essay called, “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” which was published in 1990 in his collection of pieces
called Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990). Maybe it’s time to find ways to start bringing it into reality . . .
—o0o—
“Motto: “Please step forward to the rear!” This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on a tram-car in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist.
A Conservative Believes:
- 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 (i.e. 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.
- 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-honored 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.
- 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 institutionalize brotherhood, love, and altruism is already to have a reliable blueprint for despotism.
A Liberal Believes:
- 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.
- That human communities are threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so organized 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- That it is absurd and hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflict-less 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.
- 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.
Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
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