Readers of Ko?akowski know better. They understand that what we have seen is not a failure of the free market, but a failure to abide by the rules that allow the free market to operate freely. One of those rules concerns the accurate pricing and assessment of risk, something that was ostentatiously abandoned by socialistically-inclined politicians who forced banks to lend money to people who were poor credit risks.

It may seem a long way from Wall Street to Das Kapital, but Ko?akowski's criticism of Marxism has great pertinence to our current economic and cultural situation. Marxism is a version of utopian thinking. Committed to what Ko?akowski calls "the self-deification of mankind", Marxism became "the greatest fantasy of our century". It provides a permanently valuable admonition about the danger of utopian schemes, what Ko?akowski describes as "the farcical aspect of human bondage". The farce is enacted not only in the brutal precincts of Stalinism, but also, and perhaps more insidiously, in the various "soft totalitarianisms" burgeoning throughout the Western world.

Ko?akowski's criticism of Marxism and its allotropes is only part of his intellectual portfolio. He moves with commanding ease from the intricacies of Plotinus, Augustine and the Church fathers through Descartes, Pascal, the English empiricists, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Husserl and the whole congeries of issues and figures we congregate under the rubric of modernity and its discontents.