Czeslaw Milosz has passed away, in his native Poland. He taught at Berkeley while I was studying philosophy, and although I never took his class, he was a well-known celebrity professor on campus.
His book, The Captive Mind starts with this:
"'It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abtruse books of philosophy'. "