Life After Liberalism

Abstract

„Polish readers of After Virtue in 1995 will doubtless be apt to reject this account of Western modernity as American and British readers were in 1981. But they have of course very much the same interest as those earlier readers in deciding whether its central theses are true or false. For Polish culture too was formed in part by a range of influences from the French, German, and Scottish Enlightenments - I think of philosophers as various as Stroynowski, Staszic and Kollataj - and by a variety of Polish reactions to them. But, more than this, in that openness to the prevailing Western modes of thought and practice that has followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, there is evidence of a willingness to embrace just those positions of which After Virtue is most severely critical. If After Virtue’s diagnosis of contemporary modernity is to some significant degree correct, then what it asserts must hold too, to some extend at least, of Polish modernity.“¹