Free Republic

In Ryszard Legutko's latest book, 'The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols,' the Polish professor and survivor of communism warns that the coercive attempts of modern liberals to redefine freedom are more destructive than liberating.Life under Communism was peculiar and paradoxical, observes Polish professor and politician Ryszard Legutko in his new book The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols. It was rigid and confined by an “ideological straitjacket.” Yet the abolishing of the old forms and institutions also fostered a “permanent instability,” in which “no principle was secure...

This spring, visiting professor Ryszard Legutko was prevented from speaking at Vermont's prestigious Middlebury College due to strident opposition by extremist and intolerant students. This was the second such embarrassment for the college: writer Charles Murray and a Middlebury professor were insulted and assaulted there in 2016. Professor Legutko recently related his perspective on the experience, revealing that the college not only caved to the disruptive and disrespectful students, but legitimized their conduct! Further, the students have set out to proscribe future discourse that might again ignite their sociopathic anarchy. Last year, our nation's children walked out of high schools...

Now, along comes Ryszard Legutko, a Polish professor of philosophy and leading politician, with a better answer. His book, translated by Teresa Adelson, “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies” (Encounter), methodically shows the surprising but substantial similarities between Soviet-style communism and modern liberalism as defined by Sweden or the European Union or Barack Obama. First, the ideologues retreat into fantasy which they fervently try to impose on unwilling subjects. Communists make colossal efforts to convince their vassals that they prosper far more than those wretches living in capitalist countries; liberals turn two genders into 71 or make...