In it, Miłosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People's Republic of Poland.

The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, its adherents' thought processes, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the postwar Soviet Bloc.

Miłosz describes how Western democracies were perceived with a mixture of contempt and fascination by Stalinist Central and Eastern Europe among intellectuals.

In his Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, Gobineau describes the practice of Ketman, the act of paying lip service to Islam while concealing secret opposition.

In this capacity, he wrote many short stories and gave many underground literary readings that won many recruits and strengthened the morale of the Polish Home Army.

With extensive quotations from Borowski's short stories, Miłosz describes how the former poet survived by being assigned to help unload the transports of Jews who were bound for the gas chambers.

[8] The book elaborates the idea of "enslavement through consciousness" in the penultimate chapter, and closes with a pained and personal assessment of the fate of the Baltic nations in particular.

[9] Reviewing the work in 1953 for The New York Times upon the publication of the book’s English translation, Peter Viereck wrote “The Captive Mind is the most important soul-searching ever published about… [the] love-hate ambivalence between communism and uprooted intellectuals.” [10] While reading The Captive Mind, Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, who had been living in Buenos Aires since before the Second World War, had known most of the writers whom Miłosz described in the coffeehouses and literary cafes of Pre-War Warsaw.

As he read, Gombrowicz confided in his diary, "Miłosz tells the history of the bankruptcy of literature in Poland smoothly, and I ride his book straight through that streamlined cemetery, just as, two days ago, I rode the bus along the asphalt highway.

[13] The book has been compared to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in that it, too, represents the view of an insider who draws on extensive analysis.

"[14] In 2017 Milosz’s biographer Andrzej Franaszek said in an essay in The New York Times: “Perhaps a decade ago, it would have been easy to pass off The Captive Mind as a relic of the totalitarian 20th century: However, the last decade has demonstrated how the mechanisms of mind control Milosz exposed continue to be deployed throughout the globe.”[15] Miłosz said of the book: "It was considered by anti-communists as suspect because I didn't attack strongly enough the communists.