Tadeusz Kowalik

Tadeusz Kowalik (19 November 1926 – 30 July 2012) was a Polish economist, public intellectual and political and social activist. He is notable for his dissenting leftist views expressed during the Polish systemic transformation (from 1989).

Tadeusz Kowalik was born in Kajetanówka near Lublin in what at that time was central-eastern Poland. As a youngster he became radicalized by the economic backwardness of his region under the prewar Sanation regime and then by the Nazi German occupation. In 1946 he joined the youth wing of the communist Polish Workers' Party and in 1951 graduated from the University of Warsaw.

At the height of his career Kowalik was Poland's leading political economist, professor of economics and humanities, specialist in comparative analysis of economic systems and historian of economic thought. He worked from 1960 at subunits of the Polish Academy of Sciences, from 1993 at the Institute of Economics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, taught at Warsaw's higher education institutions (social science school of the communist party and later at schools of economy and business), and at foreign universities and scholarly institutions, namely Cambridge, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., Oxford, York University in Toronto and New York's New School for Social Research. Kowalik completed all these foreign assignments before being granted a full professorship in Poland (1989).