This book introduces the English-speaking reader to the thought of Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911), an outstanding Polish philosopher and literary critic. Although little known in the West,
Brzozowski is an important forerunner of the intellectual tradition of "Western Marxism" most commonly associated with Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. Walicki argues that Brzozowski's
antinaturalistic approach resulted in a radical reinterpretation of Marxism that dealt with many of the problems of the revolt against positivism in European philosophy, and that it was
Brzozwski, not Lukacs, who initially conceived of the retrieval of the philosophical and humanist aspect of Marxism and its separation from the Engels school of "scientific Marxism."
