Breaking with Marx is not just abandoning a doctrine but resisting the illusion that history follows iron laws or that freedom must yield to utopia. It means rejecting ideology’s drive toward control and purity, and instead affirming the dignity of the person, the need for moral limits, and the vitality of pluralism. It is the harder path: to face uncertainty without dogma and to defend liberty through conscience rather than coercion.
Breaking with Marx
Apocalyptic politics, from Marx to recurrent historical doom, relieves us of responsibility by promising collapse as destiny. The antidote, as Burke and Aron knew, is prudence, the quiet art of governing without prophecy.
Conscience
In closing The Open Society, Popper stripped history of its idols. No destiny guides it, no law redeems it—only the choices of free men and women. He asked us to believe in a harsher hope: that meaning begins where necessity ends.
Polarization & Repair
In a Paris drunk on revolution, Raymond Aron stayed lucid. His realism—clear, disciplined, unafraid of limits—remains democracy’s forgotten cure: to see without frenzy, act without illusion, and hope without intoxication.
Foreign Affairs
On June 2, 1979, a philosopher-pope spoke in Warsaw and the world tilted. Karol Wojtyła’s homily restored the human person to history, turning faith into moral resistance. In a single afternoon, words—not weapons—shifted the course of the Cold War.
Technology
In 1949, Ludwig von Mises warned that polylogism—truth divided by class or race—destroys rational discourse. Today, digital echo chambers risk reviving that danger, fracturing public reason into parallel, tribal logics.
OP-ED
A single syllabus—Hayek, Popper, Berlin, Aron—became a lifelong inoculation against neo-Marxism. Those books formed a literature of liberty, teaching that freedom is fragile, pluralism irreducible, and ideology always seductive. Once read, they cannot be unread.
Breaking with Marx
From Leo XIII to John Paul II, the Church has stood with the poor—yet never by confusing justice with class struggle or dignity with enforced equality. Its vision affirms persons, not classes: for the poor, yes; for Marx, no.
Moral Courage
The Left’s pursuit of justice is noble—but without humility, it curdles into dogma. Democracy rests on fallibility and compromise. To recover humility is not weakness but the renewal of pluralism itself.
Breaking with Marx
From Party prodigy to dissident sage, Kołakowski’s journey shows how the courage to doubt can be freedom’s deepest defense. Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) lived a life that could be read as the intellectual autobiography of the twentieth century itself: born in the ruins of war, drawn into Marxist
Breaking with Marx
How one of the 20th century’s most radical philosophers abandoned Marxist utopianism for Aristotelian tradition and Thomistic faith. "I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"