LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
463
Nor are questions of legal order and of the ways of governing decidable
by an appeal to tradition; what we ought to think about is which form
of government is the most efficient in assuring social peace and better
serves human interests.
In
such issues the theory of social contract and of
enlightened egoism provide us with sufficient clues; people care about
their private affairs, and the invisible hand of the market produces a rea–
sonably working whole from those uncountable egoisms. Scientific ra–
tionalism, the development of the civil society based on juridic equality,
the theory of social contract, the actual spread of market economy and
its theoretical elaborations - all of these make together a tightly con–
nected block, of which all the components consistently contribute to the
disdain for history; any claim that it could serve as a source of legitimacy
- either in thinking or in social affairs - is denounced as a remnant of the
mythological past.
This worldview, thus crudely and simplistically depicted, formed the
ideological kernel of modernity and operated forcefully in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but never without resistance. The reality of
ethnic bonds and the continuing vitality of religious tradition could not
be quite efficiently driven out by rationalist excommunications. The
doctrine according to which the game of egoisms, colliding with each
other in a society based on greed, ultimately produces general bliss be–
came highly dubious in light of the effects of the Industrial Revolution,
and the early socialists did not fail to call the attention of the European
public to this discrepancy between theory and reality. And once the di–
vine authority and the normatively defined natural law - a weakened
God or God's modest substitute - had been done away with by ra–
tionalist and skeptical strictures, the simple question "How to distinguish
good from evil?" became unanswerable, and people were hardly made
happier by being told that the question was empty or wrongly phrased.
To be sure, Kant tried to prove that the question could be an–
swered within the framework of a rationalist worldview without ap–
pealing to history, and that rules of moral judging could be deduced
from the principles of the transcendental rationality in which we all par–
ticipate. Not many skeptics of the Enlightenment were ready to be con–
vinced by his arguments, though.
The Romantic movement seemed to be an attempt to go back
to
archaic historicity, to the belief in the legitimizing force of national
bonds that had been established in a never-disappearing past. The
Catholic temptation seemed understandable in this movement; it was the
Roman Church that could boast of its uninterrupted continuity and of
being the guardian of the original treasure of Christianity.
Neither liberals nor socialists usually paid much attention to the re–
ality of nations; to most of them it was a remnant of the past epoch,
