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.

Leszek Kołakowski was born at Radom in central Poland in October 1927. He studied philosophy clandestinely during the German occupation, took his doctorate at Warsaw University in 1953 with a thesis on Spinoza, and became one of the youngest professors of philosophy in postwar Poland. A committed Marxist in his early years, he was expelled from the Polish United Workers' Party in 1966 after a critical anniversary speech and stripped of his chair in the antisemitic campaign of March 1968; he left Poland that year, taught briefly in Montreal and Berkeley, and from 1970 was senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

His books include Religious Consciousness and the Ecclesiastical Bond (1965), The Philosophy of Positivism (1966), Marxism and Beyond (1968), the three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (1976–1978), Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), Religion: If There Is No God… (1982), Bergson (1985), Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), and Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? (2007).

Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, written from inside the tradition by a former believer, traced the Marxist project from its Hegelian and Romantic roots through its golden age to its breakdown, and remains the standard history of the school; his shorter essays on the meaning of religion, the moral force of inconsistency, and the 'conservative-liberal-socialist' creed defended the permanent place of the sacred and the limits of utopian politics. He died at Oxford in July 2009.