“None of It Matters Now”: Leszek Kołakowski between Marx and Spinoza
Journal: Modern Intellectual History
Year: 2025

This article examines the influence of Spinozism on Leszek Kołakowski’s humanist Marxism between 1953 and 1968. After historically exploring Kołakowski’s early Stalinism and his later belief that Hegel’s historical theodicy, in eradicating the contradiction between totality and particularity, abolished individual moral responsibility, it examines Kołakowski’s interpretation of Spinoza’s alternatively ahistorical and ambiguous relationship between substance and its modes, which Kołakowski admired