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Sign up todayThe Captive Mind
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Learn moreThe 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.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911โ2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, DC, as a cultural attachรฉ of the Polish Peopleโs Republic. Milosz defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his many prizes and honors are the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Berkeley Citation, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Stefan Rudnicki is an avid audiobook narrator, receiving numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. He is also a Grammy-winning audiobook producer.
Reviews
โA central text in the modern effort to understand totalitarianism.โ
โA faultlessly perceptive analysisโฆAs timely today as when it was first written.โ
โMiลoszโs political masterpiece The Captive Mind, published in 1953 and originally banned in the authorโs native Polandโฆ sets out to answer the question: How did the wisest of his postwar compatriots fall for Stalinismโthat is, for a politics of lies and fear?โฆTrumpism is not Stalinism, but the relevance of Miloszโs insightsโthat intellectuals yearn to โbelong to the massesโ; 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 puristsโcontinues to haunt meโฆWhen Milosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the committee cited his โuncompromising clear-sightedness.โ Just so.โ
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