The Origins of Modern Political Evil in Hannah Arendt and Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski and Hannah Arendt are two important thinkers in relation to the theorisation of modern political evil. Despite common ground as scholars in exile from totalitarianism, they remain seldom compared as thinkers. This paper explores certain key ideas in each one’s approach to the problem of political evil – through the lens of the “origins of dialectic” in Kołakowski’s thought and that of the “crystallization of elements of totalitarianism” in Arendt’s. It then makes a summary comparison of their two contributions to understanding political evil. The comparison includes their respective responses to Marxism and the philosophy of history, expressed in Kołakowski ’s Main Currents of Marxism and Arendt’s responses to Marx as embodied in The Human Condition and other writings. By encouraging uncompromising focus on the problem of evil, these readings can help freshen twenty-first century approaches in non-ideal theory.