The Captive Mind

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What to expect

The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

Critics Review

“A central text in the modern effort to understand totalitarianism.”

New York Times Book Review

“A faultlessly perceptive analysis…As timely today as when it was first written.”

Jerzy Kosiński, award-winning Polish American novelist

“Miłosz’s political masterpiece The Captive Mind, published in 1953 and originally banned in the author’s native Poland… sets out to answer the question: How did the wisest of his postwar compatriots fall for Stalinism—that is, for a politics of lies and fear?…Trumpism is not Stalinism, but the relevance of Milosz’s insights—that intellectuals yearn to ‘belong to the masses’; that there is never a shortage of ways to justify cruelty in the name of the presumptively higher truth; that those who refuse to conform are caricatured as self-righteous purists—continues to haunt me…When Milosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the committee cited his ‘uncompromising clear-sightedness.’ Just so.”

New York Times

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