Kolakowski, Leszek

▪ 2005

      On Nov. 5, 2003, Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy Leszek Kolakowski was awarded the first John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Kluge Prize, awarded by the U.S. Library of Congress, was intended to cover disciplines in the humanities not included in the Nobel Prizes. In 2003 it carried an award of $1 million.

      Kolakowski was born on Oct. 23, 1927, in Radom, Pol. He was educated privately and in the underground school system during the German occupation of Poland. He studied philosophy at the University of Lodz (M.A., 1950) and the University of Warsaw (Ph.D., 1953). He taught at the University of Warsaw from 1950 to 1968. Kolakowski began his scholarly career as an orthodox Marxist. He was a member of the communist youth organization and joined the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP; the communist party) in 1945, but when he was sent to Moscow for a course for promising intellectuals, he began to become disenchanted with the Soviet Marxist system. He became a part of the movement for democratization that led to the Polish workers' uprising of 1956. His revisionist critique of Stalin, “What Is Socialism?,” was officially banned in Poland but was widely circulated nonetheless. His 1959 essay “The Priest and the Jester,” in which Kolakowski explored the roles of dogmatism and skepticism in intellectual history, brought him to national prominence in Poland. In the 1950s and '60s, he published a series of books on the history of Western philosophy and a study of religious consciousness and institutional religion, at the same time attempting to define a humanistic Marxism; the latter resulted in Kultura i fetysze (1967; Towards a Marxist Humanism, 1970).

      A speech of Kolakowski's on the 10th anniversary of the 1956 uprising led to his expulsion from the PUWP in 1966. In 1968 he was dismissed from his professorship and soon afterward left Poland. He was elected in 1970 to a senior research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.

      Kolakowski eventually abandoned Marxism, which he described as “the greatest fantasy of our century.” In his most influential work, Głowne nurtu marksizmu (1976; Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution. 1978), he described the principal currents of Marxist thought and chronicled the origins, rise, and decline of Marxist communism. As an adviser and supporter of the Solidarity trade union, which challenged the communist regime in Poland, Kolakowski played a practical as well as theoretical part in the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1980s. Kolakowski wrote much on religion and the spiritual basis of culture and was the author of three plays and three volumes of stories. He was the recipient of the German Booksellers Peace Prize (1977), the Erasmus Prize (1980), a MacArthur fellowship (1983), and the Jefferson Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986).

Martin L. White

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