Democracies, Dictatorships, and Intellectuals

The 2006 LaBrosse-Levinson Lectures

The Institute invited Adam Michnik, Polish activist, former parliament member, and founder and editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading newspaper, to present the fourth annual LaBrosse-Levinson Lectures at the University of Virginia.

Apart from concerns about international terrorism, it is tempting to be sanguine about the emergence of liberal democratic states around the world. The last half century has seen a remarkable spread of democracy to every region of the world. Yet totalitarian governments and dictatorships remain. They, and in many countries the shadows still cast by fallen regimes, merit our close and sustained consideration.

Mr. Michnik spoke from his experience, having seen the oppression of dictatorship and the possibilities of democracy as a leading intellectual under both types of regime.

Michnik was co-founder of KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers), the organization of dissident intellectuals in Poland that paved the way for the Solidarity trade union in the late 1970s. Later, he was a prominent Solidarity member and participant in the Round Table Talks that eventuated in the end of communist rule in Poland. In 1989, he was elected to Poland’s first non-communist parliament.

Professor Irena Grudzinska Gross, from Boston University, was present to translate all lectures.

A portion of Mr. Michnik’s lectures is published in the Spring 2007 issue of The Hedgehog Review.