New Releases by Leszek

Professor Balcerowicz is highly regarded in both policy-making and academic circles. Most of the essays are based on his first-hand experience in stabilizing the Polish economy at an early stage of hyperinflation, and transforming it into a competitive capitalist market economy. This volume gathers together a collection of essays integrated by two central themes: the comparative economic performance of different economic systems (centralized socialism, reformed socialism, competitive socialism), and the transition from socialism to capitalism under newly established pluralistic political systems in Central and Eastern Europe.

Leszek Kolakowski discusses, in a highly original way, the arguments for and against the existence of God as they have been conducted through the ages. He examines the critiques of religious belief, from the Epicureans through Nietzsche to contemporary anthropological inquiry, the assumptions that underlie them, and the counter-arguments of such apologists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal. His exploration of the philosophy of religion covers the historical discussions of the nature and existence of evil, the importance of the concepts of failure and eternity to the religious impulse, the relationship between skepticism and mysticism, and the place of reason, understanding, and in models of religious thought. He examines why people, throughout known history, have cherished the idea of eternity and existence after death, and why this hope has been dependent on the worship of an eternal reality. He confronts the problems of meaning in religious language.

Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1992. In this landmark study, two eminent geographers present the first comparative, cross-national analysis of emergency evacuations engendered by every sort of disaster: military, natural, and industrial. Zelinsky and Kosinski have selected 27 evacuations of cities due to actual or anticipated emergencies during the past fifty years, from the Ohio River Flood of 1937 to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.

The seeds of this volume were contained in a series of lectures delivered by Leszak Nowak to his co-interned activists of Solidarity in a Polish prison in 1982. From the stance of a political philosopher, Nowak suggests statements about power; as a social theorist, he proposes a systematization of hypotheses into idealized models of increasing realism. Most books on socialism are based on either radical or conservative ideologies; Power and Civil Society, however begins with radical assumptions but reaches rather conservative conclusions. Nowak''s discussion of the three independent main social divisions--owners/producers, rulers/ruled, and priests or mass-culture-media/believers--reveals the separation of these divisions in class societies and their integration into a triple class of rulers-owners-priests in real-socialism societies. Nowak contends that triple-class rulers wrest control of political power from both owner and priest classes and undergo regularities of political power in its pure form. The thrust of the book is an elaboration of a proposal of the general theory of political power that confronts it with its classic area of application--the history of the Soviet Union--by offering a series of models beginning with the most abstract. Each subsequent model presents a more complicated network of interconnections that characterize the phenomenon of political power. The sixteen-chapter volume is structured into five major divisions that begin with a discussion of some basic assumptions on the nature of power and the non-Christian model of man. Part Two considers some elementary models of power by focusing on idealizing conditions, revolution, the organization of civil society, and citizens'' utopia. Global Models of Power, Part Three, treats the mechanism of aggression, the structure and development of an empire, and a block of countries. Special models of power are surveyed in Part Four. The book concludes with an attempt to confront the modeling construction with the history of the socialist world both at the level of the relations between rulers and ruled, political institutions, political doctrines, and international relations within the Soviet empire. Here Nowak seeks to locate both those trends which can be approximately explained by a certain model of the presented hierarchy and those which can not. Six appendixes deal with such phenomena as The Conception of Class Loop and the Rotating Elites Theory, Social Consciousness as a Hypostasis, and more. This book will be excellent reading for Sovietologists, Political Theorists, Social Philosophers, and Philosophers of History.

This volume contains two unusual and appealing satirical works by the well-known European philosopher Kolakowski. The first, Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia, is set in a fictional land. Each story illustrates some aspect of human inability to come to terms with imperfection, infinitude, history, and nature. The second, The Key to Heaven, is a collection of seventeen biblical tales from the Old Testament told in such a way that the story and the moral play off each other to illustrate political, moral, or existential foibles and follies.

Henri Bergson was born the year that Darwin publishedOn the Origin of Species. The significance of this and other works on the theory of evolution in the development of Bergson''s philosophy became clear when he publishedCreative Evolutionand established himself as one of Europe''s most influential thinkers. Kolakowski shows how Bergson sought to reconcile Darwinian theory with the view that all matter is propelled by an internal life-drive.

A highly original discussion of the philosophical argumetns for and against the existence of God.

"Kołakowski discusses the origins, philosophical roots, golden age and breakdown of Marxism, and the various schools of Marxist philosophy. He describes Marxism as "the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century", a dream of a perfect society which became a foundation for "a monstrous edifice of lies, exploitation and oppression." He argues that the Leninist and Stalinist versions of communist ideology are not a distortion or degenerate form of Marxism, but one of its possible interpretations. Despite his rejection of Marxism, his interpretation of Marx is influenced by Lukács."

"Kołakowski discusses the origins, philosophical roots, golden age and breakdown of Marxism, and the various schools of Marxist philosophy. He describes Marxism as "the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century", a dream of a perfect society which became a foundation for "a monstrous edifice of lies, exploitation and oppression." He argues that the Leninist and Stalinist versions of communist ideology are not a distortion or degenerate form of Marxism, but one of its possible interpretations. Despite his rejection of Marxism, his interpretation of Marx is influenced by Lukács."