Leszek Kolakowski
| Leszek Kołakowski | |
|---|---|
Kołakowski in 1971
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| Born |
23 October 1927 Radom, Poland |
| Died | 17 July 2009 (aged 81) Oxford, England |
| Alma mater |
Łódź University University of Warsaw (PhD, 1953) |
| Awards | Jerusalem Prize (2007) |
| Era | 20th / 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School |
Continental philosophy Western Marxism Marxist Humanism |
| Institutions | University of Warsaw |
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Notable ideas
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Humanist interpretation of Marx |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Leszek Kołakowski (Polish: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; 23 October 1927 – 17 July 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism (1976). In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”
Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland. Owing to the German occupation of Poland (1939-1945) in World War II, he did not go to school but read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his school-leaving examinations as an external student in the underground school system. After the war he studied philosophy at Łódź University. By the late 1940s it was obvious that he was one of the most brilliant Polish minds of his generation, and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University with a thesis on Baruch Spinoza in which he viewed Spinoza from a Marxist point of view. He served as a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968.
In his youth Kołakowski became a communist. In the period 1947 to 1966 he was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow in 1950, where he saw communism in practice and found it repulsive. He broke with Stalinism, becoming a "revisionist Marxist" advocating a humanist interpretation of Marx. One year after the 1956 Polish October, Kołakowski published a four-part critique of Soviet-Marxist dogmas, including historical determinism, in the Polish periodical Nowa Kultura. His public lecture at Warsaw University on the tenth anniversary of Polish October led to his expulsion from the Polish United Workers' Party. In the course of the 1968 Polish political crisis he lost his job at Warsaw University and was prevented from obtaining any other academic post.
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