Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kołakowski, and the Futures Past of the European Historical Subject: Encounters from 1956 to 1995

This paper traces the encounters between German thinker Jürgen Habermas and Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski from the early Cold War through the fall of communism, foregrounding the generative role of dialogue across the ‘Iron Curtain’ in shaping European historical imaginations and politics in 1989. Both thinkers shared substantial philosophical inspiration and foundational normative questions as they searched for paths forward in Marxist philosophy after Fascism and Stalinism. Furthermore, they found venues for exchange and discussion, including in such settings as the summer schools hosted by the Yugoslavian Marxist Praxis group. I explore the convergences and divergences in their work on philosophy of history by tracing these exchanges, charting their gradual abandonment of history as a source of universal normative truth from 1956 to 1968. The paper then follows how, after Habermas invited Kołakowski to fill the Frankfurt chair of philosophy which became vacant after the death of Theodor Adorno in 1969, each philosopher drifted away from radicalism and increasingly looked for ways to philosophically defend the historical accomplishments of European modernity against its critics. The paper ends by reconstructing the context of a public 1991 debate in Warsaw between Habermas, Kołakowski, and Richard Rorty on the future of European philosophy. Ultimately, I argue that Kołakowski and Habermas can be seen as participants in the emptying of ‘capital H History,’ as a process capable of disclosing the foundations of European politics. While they began with the attempt to reimagine history from within Marxism in pursuit of a renewed European socialism, they ultimately converged with the notion of an ‘End of History’ which arose in 1989. This changing historical horizon sheds light on the relationship between Central and Eastern European political imaginations and their Western European counterparts as continental integration became possible with the fall of communism.