In Memory of a Friend 

Marcin Król 

by Ivan Vejvoda 

The passing of Marcin Król (May 19, 1944—November 25, 2020), a very close friend and colleague of the IWM and of many of its fellows, leaves a great void for all.

Marcin was a recurrent guest and visiting fellow at the IWM from its founding in 1982. He participated in many conferences and events, contributing to Transit, the IWM’s journal, and its other publications. He was a close friend of IWM founder and first rector Krzysztof Michalski with whom among others he helped set up in 1995 the Institute for Public Affairs (ISP) in Warsaw. He was the chair of the ISP Foundation Board.

Marcin was a member of the IWM Academic Advisory Board and participated in the IWM’s Summer Schools on Philosophy and Politics in Cortona, Italy. In 2004, for example, he taught a course with John Gray entitled “What can we learn today from the conservative thinkers of the past.” Since 2005, he was in charge of the Józef Tischner Debates from the Polish side. These debates were launched jointly by the IWM and the University of Warsaw in memory of Tischner, a prominent Polish priest and philosopher who was founding president of the IWM. The debates were always chaired by Marcin Król and Krzysztof Michalski, with the latter’s role subsequently filled by Shalini Randeria and IWM fellows. In March 2020, Marcin chaired the 29th Tischner Debate in Warsaw under the title “History and Justice.”

Most of all, Marcin always felt a sense of responsibility to the IWM. After Krzysztof Michalski’s untimely death in 2013, he helped ensure that the institute’s work could continue. His support was rooted in an unwavering commitment to the IWM mission.

Marcin Król was a philosopher and historian of ideas. He graduated in 1972 from the Faculty of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Later he obtained academic degrees—first a PhD, then a habilitation. In 1999, he received the academic title of professor of humanities. He served as dean of the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Rehabilitation of the University of Warsaw and was a member of the Stefan Batory Foundation Council and the author of numerous books and journalistic pieces.

In 1979, together with a group of Polish intellectuals, he founded the independent journal Res Publica. He was its founding editor-in-chief and remained chairman of the Res Publica Foundation Board. He was a staunch advocate for liberal democracy and civil liberties, and Res Publica served as a vehicle for spreading ideas and fostering debates on key philosophical and political issues. He was an engaged intellectual and prominent thinker with a keen eye for philosophy and social sciences but also current events.

I met Marcin in Madralin near Warsaw in 1991 thanks to the New School for Social Research from New York and its East and Central Europe Program, at a meeting of the Democracy Seminar, a program that had been convening since 1986. It was Jonathan Fanton, president of the New School at the time, and professors Ira Katznelson, Jeffrey Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia— the spiritus movens of the project— who brought together intellectuals from the US and Western Europe with those of us from East, Central and South Eastern Europe.

We continued meeting throughout the early 1990s as part of the Democracy Seminar network. We were all keen to learn from each other’s experiences in the early days of democratic transition. We were all in unchartered waters, and Marcin was not only an insightful observer but also someone who saw further and more broadly than many others. Even with his many other endeavors, he made the time to closely follow the events in my former country of Yugoslavia and the conflict that led to enormous suffering and, ultimately, the country’s disintegration. He would call and inquire about specific developments and events. He was a man of great empathy and understanding.

It has been said that Marcin was not a revolutionary, but he was aware of the need for radical change. In June 2015 he published an article in Visegrad Insight titled “Let us become radical.”

Klaus Nellen has pointedly noted that in Marcin’s article “Polen zwischen Ost und West”, published in Transit 25 (Polen im neuen Europa, 2003, 12–22), he wrote at the end: “… muss man sich wohl damit abfinden, dass Polen wegen seiner Zwischenlage und seiner schieren Größe immer ein Problem für Europa darstellen wird – mal ein kleineres, mal ein größeres. Dies soll keine Warnung sein, bloß die Feststellung einer Tatsache, die immer klarer zu Tage tritt, je näher der Beitritt des Landes zur Europäischen Union rückt.” It turned out to be a warning, more than Marcin or anyone else would have imagined at the time, Nellen remarked.

We have lost a dear friend, an irreplaceable loss. 

Ivan Vejvoda is Permanent Fellow at the IWM. 

Conversations, before and after death 

by Marci Shore 

“We were Stupid,” a stunning interview with Polish philosopher Marcin Król, appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza in 2014, during the revolution in Ukraine. I no longer remember who sent it to me, or whether I chanced to come upon it. I do remember where I was when I read it: sitting on the floor of the bedroom in an apartment we were renting in Vienna’s 6th district, where I was watching the livestreaming of the Maidan.

It was the beginning of February. By then something had already turned. In November no one had expected to die on the Maidan. By the end of January, even from a distance, an existential shift was palpable— a critical mass of people had made a decision: they were willing to die there if need be. I was terrified—and captivated—waiting for the violence to come. I didn’t then understand myself why I had been so drawn in.

In the midst of this, I read the interview with Marcin Król. The journalist, Grzegorz Sroczyński, had been fifteen years old in 1989; he is of my generation. He was responding to Marcin’s 2012 book Europa w obliczu końca (“Europe in the face of the end”) which opened with disquieting pessimism: “We are dealing with a moderate economic crisis, a serious political crisis, a dramatic civilizational crisis, and perhaps a fatal spiritual crisis.”

Grzegorz Sroczyński, not unreasonably, asked, “What is the fatal spiritual crisis?”

“We’ve stopped asking ourselves questions,” Marcin answered.

“What kind of questions?”

“Metaphysical questions. No one, for instance, contemplates where evil comes from.”

And just then I understood something: the Maidan was the reappearance of those metaphysical questions we had stopped asking ourselves. That was why I could not turn away.

Those questions had drawn me to Eastern Europe when I was the same age as Marcin had been when he began to study philosophy. I was coming from suburban America— the world of Gilligan’s Island and station wagons and TV dinners; I was working at an after-school job at a Benetton store in a strip mall when the Berlin Wall fell. I wanted to learn about evil, and about truth. I wanted to go there, where those conversations were happening. 

When as a student, I crossed for the first time the Iron Curtain that was no more, I went looking for philosophers, erstwhile students of Jan Patočka, signatories of Charter 77. The first word I learned in Czech was pravda, the word for “truth.” I’d had no idea that this word could be so tangible, could carry so much weight.

(In November 2019 I watched Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testify at Donald Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Forty years earlier, Vindman, his two brothers and his widowed father had come to the United States as refugees from Soviet Ukraine. A Eurasian specialist fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, Vindman had been on Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. “Dad, do not worry,” Vindman said in his opening statement, “I will be fine for telling the truth.” And as I listened, I thought: this was not the American “truth.” This was pravda, bearing the sense it bore for Marcin Król and the signatories of Charter 77 and other dissidents under communism.)

Yet I arrived in Eastern Europe precisely when the time of conversations about truth was ending, when people stopped asking themselves those metaphysical questions—the questions we were not asking ourselves in the America I had come from either. And now Marcin Król’s self-critical “we were stupid” helped me make sense of the past quarter-century.

I knew Marcin as a friend of Krzysztof Michalski. Once upon a time at Warsaw University both of them had been students of the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. In 1966, Marcin had approached Kołakowski with a proposition to write his thesis about the Camus-Sartre split. Marcin could write about that later— Kołakowski told him—right now he was going to write his thesis about the epistemological absolute in Descartes and Husserl. (Long afterwards, when his children were behaving badly, Marcin would tell them to memorize passages of his thesis about the epistemological absolute.)

For Kołakowski—explained Marcin—philosophy was about two fundamental questions: the question of meaning, and the question of truth. Both he and Krzysztof had taken Kołakowski’s idea of a “horizon of truth” intensely seriously.

“Of course, it’s possible to go through life and never ask questions about its meaning,” wrote Marcin, “but what kind of life is that? It’s the life of a ram—which I say with all respect for rams.”

A few years had passed since Krzysztof ’s untimely death in 2013 when Marcin and I began an epistolary conversation about him. We never finished it, if there is such a thing as finishing this kind of conversation. In 1968, Marcin, like so many of their mutual friends, had gone to prison. Krzysztof had not. In Krzysztof’s biography, this not having gone to prison mattered very much: he had not been proud of it. Marcin did not hold this—his friend’s cautiousness, perhaps his lack of bravery—against him. “Not everyone has a suitable temperament for that,” he wrote to me. “After all, not everyone is able to treat a several-month stay in prison as an opportunity to gather anthropological insights.”

Their differences in temperament were philosophical as well. Marcin was not especially fond of Kant. He preferred Tocqueville and Rousseau. “In general,” he wrote to me, “I have the feeling that German idealism is superfluous, but don’t tell anyone.”

As far as Heidegger was concerned, Marcin recognized his value, but he bore no love for him. For Krzysztof, in contrast, Heidegger was the philosopher of responsibility, the eyes in the portrait that appeared to be staring at him, wherever he might be, reminding him of the weight of each step of his life. For Marcin it was Hannah Arendt who played this role: she was the one who insisted on the responsibility, always and everywhere, to think.

Thinking meant pursuing the search for truth. Patočka and Kołakowski, like both Marcin and Krzysztof, resisted the postmodern turn. None of them died harboring any utopian illusions, be they epistemological, political or otherwise. The search for truth—however unlikely to succeed—was impermissible to give up. “Truth must remain our guidepost, even though the direction of our path is uncertain, and the destination barely known,” Marcin insisted.

Likewise was it impermissible to lay aside the question of evil. 

The pursuit of these questions demanded intensive conversation. Long after Krzysztof ’s death Marcin still had conversations with Krzysztof in his head. When he said this, I remembered an afternoon years earlier, when Krzysztof and I had been walking down Chapel Street in New Haven towards a very small coffee shop I have not visited since. We were talking about the philosophy of history. And at one moment Krzysztof said to me, “It’s a shame that Jan Patočka isn’t here, he would have a lot to say on this subject.” Krzysztof said this to me in a tone which would have caused someone who overheard us to assume that Jan Patočka was a friend or colleague, perhaps, inconveniently for us, out of town at the moment, surely to return.

In 1987, Marcin came to Vienna for IWM’s commemoration of Patočka on the tenth anniversary of the Czech philosopher’s death. The evening took place at Schwarzenberg Palace, where Krzysztof had arranged for live jazz music. In the unadulterated tone of the trumpet Marcin heard a challenge, calling us to truth. He felt the presence of Patočka, who loved jazz, and wondered what it really meant to depart from the world.

“After all,” he wrote, “only those among the dead with whom we still have conversations remain alive for us.”  

This is an abridged version of the introduction to a forthcoming volume of Marcin Król’s last texts. 

Marci Shore is Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a regular Visiting Fellow at the IWM. 

“We were stupid.” 

Interview by Grzegorz Sroczyński / Translated by Timothy Snyder 

Translator’s note: Marcin Król was one of the leading oppositional thinkers during the last decade of communist Poland, in the 1980s. He set himself the task of reviving conservative political thought, not for immediate application in politics, but rather as an exercise that allowed for a discussion of political purposes beyond the pressing demands of the moment. He remained a very prominent political and social thinker of the first three decades of the Polish transformation. This interview, in which Marcin Król points to neoliberalism as a founding error of postcommunism, was a turning point in east European discussion of the transformation. It cannot do justice to the sense of adventure and erudition on display in his thirty or so books and countless essays. It does however give a hint of how a ceaselessly critical spirit can cohabit with an unbroken desire to ask the deepest questions. Marcin Król was a friend of the IWM from the beginning. Among many other services, he helped to organize the Tischner Debates in Warsaw. The 30th Tischner Debate, held on May 19, 2021, was devoted to Marcin Król’s legacy.

The excerpt begins at a point where Marcin Król is describing a certain kind of illusion about the automatic self-preservation of liberal democracy.  

Marcin Król: So long as liberal democracy is the final stage of humanity, then it will go on by itself, just like that, no need to worry about it. Maybe the world is not ideal, but it is bearable; we have to correct it, neaten things up, poke around a bit, so that economic growth is 4% and not 3%, and we’ll somehow get by. Nothing bad can ever happen again. And just that, exactly that way of thinking, is what is very threatening.  

Grzegorz Sroczyński: Why?

Król: Because something bad will happen, and when it does we’ll be swinging from the lampposts. Just like that. By not doing anything, we are cultivating the forces that will change the world in their own way. And they will not negotiate.  

Sroczyński: Who?  

Król: Let’s say the nationalists. That wave is coming. For liberal democracy to last for another fifty years, there will have to be essential changes having to do with regaining the idea of equality in some sensible form. This isn’t easy and no one knows how to do it. In any case I don’t. I only know that we live in a world where eighty-five people have more wealth than half of humankind, than 3.5 billion people. An absolutely sick situation. I have never been one to panic; even when Gomułka put me in prison in 1968 I thought that everything would turn out well. And so I wrote a gloomy book to spread this fear to others. Maybe it will move someone to act. This will all end badly if reasonable people do not take up the universal ideals of equality and fraternity.

Sroczyński: That’s new.  

Król: New? Those are the old slogans. Liberty, equality, fraternity.  

Sroczyński: Yes. It’s just that from that triad your generation chose liberty and spoke mainly about that. Free and enterprising people will do wonderfully well, so long as no one hinders them. The quarterly Res Publica, which you edited, was full of texts like that.

Król: We were stupid. In the 1980s we fell under the influence of neoliberal ideology; I bear a lot of responsibility here. (…) My enthusiasm died out pretty quickly. I figured out that the individualistic element in liberalism was beginning to dominate, driving out other important values and killing the sense of community. This is not very hard to explain. Individualism has strong support from the forces of the free market, which make money from the individualistic model of life. Social and civic values, by contrast, don’t have that kind of rocket fuel behind them. From an economic point of view they are “ineffective.” Everyone was under the illusion that each person could live separately, in the framework of personal freedom work somewhere or other, earn as much as possible, enjoy life as much as possible, and someone or other will run the government. That it was possible just to be concerned with one’s own pleasure, and not be concerned with the actual issues of the world. (…) Liberal democracy is just a happy coincidence. And human rights as well. It’s very possible that our ban on torture is nothing more than a little interval in history. That it is not the crowning point in some natural process in the development of humanity, as Fukuyama and some others fancied.  

Sroczyński: It’s not a very encouraging thought—that human rights are just an accident. 

Król: Right. But if you think it that way, then you’ll stop sitting in front of the television drinking beer. Because so long as it is a coincidence and not an inevitable stage of development, then perhaps you have to take an interest in what direction things are taking, right? No one will sort this out for you: not the experts, not the laws of history, not even the fatum of the free market. You have to sort it out for yourself. (…) There is a boundary, which no group of experts can define, but which nonetheless makes itself known from time to time. The boundary, speaking in the most general way now, is the boundary of injustice. And so it goes on, until a spark appears and then the next shock comes.  

Sroczyński: Revolution.  

Król: A change. A revolt of a large group of people who were wrongly given hope. Because what society does today is create hopes that it cannot fulfill, on a scale that is historically unprecedented. Millions of people are educated, exposed to the allure of the world, told by television and self-help books “you can do more,” “develop yourself,” “be better,” “live at full throttle.” And then it all turns out to be a joke. So long as the social classes were open and there was a general chance for advance, this could function. But all of that has gotten worse. America kept itself afloat for quite a while with the myth of the ‘self-made man’: someone who through hard work alone attained high social status and can now flaunt it, ride around in a Rolls, buy villas and yachts. The idea is that you might be envious of such a person but you don’t resent him.  

Sroczyński: Because you think that will be you in about thirty years.  

Król: Right. Hope. That was the mechanism that allowed people to bear increasing social inequality without a peep. But it no longer works. The chasm is too great. No matter how long of a running start I get, I am never going to jump across.  

Sroczyński: In your book you speak of “a moderate economic crisis, a serious political crisis, a dramatic civilizational crisis and a perhaps mortal spiritual crisis.” What is a mortal spiritual crisis?  

Król: We no longer ask ourselves questions.  

Sroczyński: Which ones?  

Król: Metaphysical questions. No one gives any thought to the question of whence evil arises. And that question was the source of intellectual progress in Europe for eighteen centuries. (…) The source of all of our problems is the decline of thinking. That’s what this is all about, fundamentally. Thinking which took itself seriously. To concentrate and read four newspaper columns of something serious, without little jokes, little interruptions, cute little pictures—this is a deed like a voyage to Mars. Hannah Arendt, my guide to intellectual and moral life, thought that thinking was the most important thing under the sun and that if we do not take thinking seriously we cannot understand the world. And today we do not take thinking seriously, it is just one more attraction available on the market.  

Sroczyński: (…) How to live? (…)  

Król: No! Not how to live. That is the typical question of our times. You’ll find that question everywhere, along with every possible answer, in thousands of self-help books piled up in bookstores. We ask that question constantly because of the false belief that it is possible to have an instruction book to life, to check the boxes and then to be liberated from thinking. So one more time we land in the lap of the experts, whose job it is to unburden us from responsibility. We shouldn’t ask ‘How to live?’ We should ask ‘Why?’  

Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 February 7, 2014, excerpted. Translation by Timothy Snyder. 

Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the IWM.