Ryszard Legutko

Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—fighting with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. After living for two decades under a liberal democracy, he discovered that these two political systems have much more in common than one might think. Both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion,...

This new series of scholarly reflections on the interpretation of Socratic philosophy is an inviting combination of intuition and meticulous analysis. Ryszard Legutko provides the reader a monumental service in his confrontation of the most important and influential literature written on the subject to date. He likewise opens the conversation to European contributions and renders Socrates truly a figurehead of...

The book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three concepts of freedom, which are called, respectively, negative, positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and rule others, inner freedom as being oneself, that is, being an author of one's decisions. Each concept is...

In addition to On Liberty and On Representative Government, this new selection of Mill’s writings includes, among others, a number of less known of his writings, such as: "Civilization," "Perfectibility," "The Negro Question," "On Education," "On Aristocracy," "On Marriage," "On Free Press," "Socialism," Mill’s review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, his letters to Tocqueville, and several other writings. If one...