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Shop nowThe 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 (1911–2004) 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 attaché of the Polish People’s 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
“A central text in the modern effort to understand totalitarianism.”
“A faultlessly perceptive analysis…As timely today as when it was first written.”
“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.”
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