Leszek Kolakowski 1927 – 2009

Leszek Kolakowski was a Polish philosopher and the most influential critic of Marxism from within the Marxist tradition. After early Marxist work that had brought him to a chair at Warsaw, he was expelled from the Polish United Workers' Party in 1966 and from the country in 1968 for his role in the post-Stalinist liberalization. He spent the rest of his career at Oxford, where he held a senior research fellowship at All Souls. His three-volume Main Currents of Marxism remains the standard critical history of the Marxist tradition, and his many essays on religion, modernity, and the limits of utopia made him one of the great twentieth-century European essayists.