Kolakowski's "'Main Currents of Marxism' (1978), is a demolition of a sham philosophy..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324329204578272261736385142.html

What Isn't to Be Done

Leszek Kolakowski devoted a lifetime to explaining why so many of his fellow intellectuals fell for murderous ideologies.

By BARTON SWAIM

Leszek Kolakowski, who died in 2009, was an intellectual in the best sense of that word: a scholar of vast learning, a writer with a gift for the clear and felicitous expression of complex ideas, and a man who didn't overestimate his own importance. While he is usually labeled a philosopher, there is no philosophical system one could call "Kolakowskianism." He was more a historian of ideas than a philosopher in his own right; his greatest work, the three-volume "Main Currents of Marxism" (1978), is a demolition of a sham philosophy rather than the expression of a real one.
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"Erasmus and his God," published in Polish in 1965, captures the essence of Erasmus's doctrine far better than more specialized explanations. Erasmus, Kolakowski thought, tried to combine the "faith alone" approach of Luther and Calvin with Roman Catholicism's emphasis on works and moral virtue. But the strength of this approach is misleading, "for it tells Christians to behave as if everything depended on their own efforts while at the same time telling them that nothing does." Kolakowski saw this as "a particular instance of the difficulty inherent in any doctrine which views genuine human effort as the unique source of moral value while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any human contribution to the results of that effort."