Captive Minds

I have written before about how Czeslaw Milosz’s 1951 book The Captive Mind is one of the most important—and seldom read, alas—books of the twentieth century. The book is a taxonomy of the usually gradual (but absolute) capitulation to Communism of a number of Polish intellectuals familiar to Milosz following World War II. Intellectuals, in my experience, are the most prone to ideology, and the higher up the academic (BA, MA, Ph.D.) scale they are, the more inclined they are to an uncompromising...