Andrzej Walicki - Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia

This book, which was finished in September 1992, is mostly a result of several years of my research and teaching at the University of Notre Dame. Several chapters are directly related to my graduate courses on "The Marxist Conception of Freedom," "Soviet Marxism," and "The Marxist Theory of Communism."

Work on this book was also supported by the following institutions: the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at the University of Bowling Green (Ohio), where I spent the spring semester of 1989; the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, whose fellowship in 1990-91 enabled me to enjoy several months of productive work and lively scholarly contacts in Russia; and finally, the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (Canberra), which offered me three months' visiting fellowship from May through August 1992. To all these institutions, grateful acknowledgment is made.

Among friends and colleagues to whom I feel indebted for helping me to persist in coping with the vast and often thankless subject of this book, I should mention the following:

Dr. Zbigniew Pelczynski, from Pembroke College, Oxford, who in 1980 became interested in my views on Marxism and asked me to write an essay on "The Marxian Conception of Freedom" for the book Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (ed. Z. Pelczynski and J. Gray, London, 1984); Professor Leszek Kolakowski, an old friend who read this essay in 1981 and, despite his declining interest in the subject, encouraged me

-vii-

to continue my work in this field; Sir Isaiah Berlin, who read my article "Marx and Freedom," commented on it in a long letter to me, and recommended it for publication in the New York Review of Books; and finally, Professor T. H. Rigby, from the Australian National University, who read the last two chapters, commented on them, and above all, supported my hope that a book by an intellectual historian might prove interesting and relevant to political scientists.

I am grateful also to Mrs. Elisabeth Short, the research assistant in the History of Ideas Unit in the Australian National University, for reading chapters 4, 5, and 6 and greatly improving my style. Of course, she is not responsible for the final linguistic shape of this work.

-viii-