Philosopher, intellectual historian, and cultural critic, Leszek Kolakowski has examined the relationships of freedom and belief, in many different contexts, for half a century. His scholarly work has made him a preeminent spokesperson for, and exemplar of, European culture. In recognition of his wide ranging contributions to many disciplines, but particularly to the history of philosophy and philosophy of religion, he became, in 2003, the first recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize, an award made for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences by the United States Library of Congress. Since 1970, Dr. Kolakowski has been a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where, upon his retirement in 1995, he was given the title of honorary emeritus senior research fellow. He is the author of a monumental study, Religious Consciousness and Church Allegiance: Studies in 17th Century Non-denominational Christianity (1965 and 1997 in Polish; published in French as Chretiens sans Eglise, 1969), an examination of a vast array of little-known thinkers from all over Europe who embraced Christian ideas but rejected traditional ecclesial affiliations. But surely he is best known for his prophetic three-volume Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Breakdown (1976-1978), a stunningly comprehensive history of the origins, structure, and posthumous development of the system of thought that was unrivaled in its impact on the last century.

Born in Poland eighty years ago, Dr. Kolakowski was educated in his country’s underground school system during the Nazi occupation. After World War II, he joined the Communist party and continued his studies at the University of Lodz. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Warsaw in 1953. He taught at both universities and at the Institute of Social Sciences run by the party’s Central Committee. Sent to Moscow by the party to take a course for promising young Communist intellectuals, he published political essays in various papers and journals upon his return to Poland while continuing his academic career. With the tightening of the Stalinist’s repressive grip in the mid-1950s, however, Dr. Kolakowski became one of the leading voices for the democratization of Polish life. As a revisionist Marxist, he wrote “What Is Socialism?” (1956)—a short, incisive critique of Stalinism that was banned in his own country, though it was circulated privately and later published in English. He became increasingly outspoken even as he was made professor and chairman of the history of philosophy at the University of Warsaw in 1959. Expelled from the party in 1966, he was dismissed from his academic chair two years later and left Poland.

Dr. Kolakowski became a visiting professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and, in 1969, at the University of California at Berkeley before taking up his fellowship at All Souls. His works, appearing in Poland in underground editions, continued to shape the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition to Communism and inspired the activities of the Committee for the Defense of Workers, of which he was a foreign member, and of the underground educational enterprise known as the Flying University. As an active supporter, from abroad, of Solidarity, he inspired and empowered the movement that challenged and began unraveling the Soviet system in Eastern Europe.

In the West, Dr. Kolakowski became increasingly recognized for his defense of the human longing for the transcendent; his work offered an alternative to a pervasive secularism, especially within the academy. He was as a visiting professor at Yale University in 1974 and, from 1981 to 1994, a professor in the Committee of Social Thought and in the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. A fellow of the British Academy and the Polish Academy of Sciences, he is also a foreign fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kolakowski’s numerous other honors include the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association, the Erasmus Prize, the Prix Tocqueville, the Jefferson Award, the Jerusalem Prize, the University of Chicago Laing Award, the Vellion Foundation European Prize for the Essay, the Jurzykowski Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The author of some four hundred essays in four languages, he has written more than thirty books. The earliest included a series of major studies on a wide range of European philosophers, beginning with one on Spinoza entitled The Individual and Infinity (1958). It was followed by Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle (1966 and 2003), Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), works on Bergson (1957 and 1984), Metaphysical Horror (1988 and 2001), and God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and the Spirit of Jansenism (1995). A collection of Dr. Kolakowski’s early essays on Marxism was published as Towards a Marxist Humanism (1970), a volume that made clear his rejection of determinism and belief in individual moral responsibility. His hugely influential Main Currents of Marxism, first published in Polish by Instytut Literacki (in Paris) then in English by Oxford University Press, was reprinted in a single volume by Norton last year—and remains a testimony to its author’s analytical sophistication in tracing a history of ideas. His uncompromisingly moral reading of the past is reflected in his most recent book, My Correct View of Everything, which was published in 2005 by St. Augustine’s Press and addresses virtually every major historical, philosophical, and political problem of the twentieth century, along with the enduring dilemmas of the human condition.