Leszek Kołakowski

Early Life and Communist Formation

Leszek Kołakowski was born on October 23, 1927, in Radom, Poland. His childhood was marked by the catastrophic disruptions of the Nazi occupation: his father was shot by the Gestapo in 1943. After the war, the young Kołakowski, like many Polish intellectuals of his generation, embraced Communism as the most coherent framework for the total reconstruction of a society shattered by fascism. He joined the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in 1945 and pursued his philosophical education at the University of Łódź and then the University of Warsaw.

In his early career, Kołakowski was an orthodox Marxist and a committed participant in the reconstruction of Polish intellectual and cultural life under the Communist regime. His early writings engaged the history of philosophy — particularly Spinoza and the problem of individuality — and attempted to develop a materialist approach to the history of ideas. He became a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Warsaw.

Revisionism and the Break with Orthodoxy

By the mid-1950s, particularly following the revelations of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956), Kołakowski had become one of the leading figures of the 'revisionist' movement within Polish Marxism — a group that sought to rescue the humanist and democratic dimensions of Marx's early writings from the bureaucratic ossification of Stalinism.

His famous 1956 essay 'What Is Socialism?' — circulated widely in samizdat form — began with the ironic statement of all the things socialism is not (a state in which a man who has not committed a crime sits in prison, a state that conquers foreign countries while calling it assistance, etc.) and became a defining document of the reform Communist movement throughout Eastern Europe.

But Kołakowski's revisionism was philosophically deeper than political reform. His studies of the history of ideas — particularly his work on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, collected in Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna (Religious Consciousness and Church Affiliation, 1965; translated as Religious Consciousness and Church Allegiance) — drew him toward a sustained engagement with religion, myth, and the limits of secular rationalism that would become a permanent feature of his thought.

He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1966, following a speech at the University of Warsaw marking the tenth anniversary of the 'thaw' in which he declared that the Polish October of 1956 had been followed by systematic betrayal. The Party's disciplinary response — which included his dismissal from his professorship — converted him from a reformist critic into an outright opponent of the system.

Exile and Major Works

Following the student protests of March 1968, during which Kołakowski was one of the intellectual figures around whom students rallied, he was definitively expelled from his university position. In 1968 he left Poland for a fellowship at McGill University, and thereafter took up permanent positions outside Poland: at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1970 at All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained as a Senior Research Fellow until his death.

The major intellectual achievement of his exile years was Główne nurty marksizmu (Main Currents of Marxism), published in three volumes in Polish in Paris (1976–1978), translated into English in 1978. This extraordinary work — which Kołakowski had been preparing for decades — traces the entire history of Marxist thought from Marx's own sources (Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon) through the major traditions of the Second International, Lenin and Leninism, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, the Frankfurt School, and the structuralist Marxism of Althusser, to a devastating conclusion: that Leninism was not a betrayal of Marx but a legitimate — perhaps the most legitimate — development of tendencies immanent in Marx's own thought, particularly the authoritarian vanguardism of What Is to Be Done? and the teleological determinism of the Marxist philosophy of history.

The work is both a work of scholarship — comprehensive, philologically careful, intellectually fair — and a philosophical verdict: that Marxism's promise of a total rational organization of human society contained the seeds of the totalitarian state, and that the Soviet system was not an accidental deformation but an expression of Marxism's own internal logic.

Philosophy of Religion and Myth

Alongside the Marxism project, Kołakowski developed a distinctive philosophy of religion that cannot be reduced to either orthodox religious apologetics or secular critique. His Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975) engaged phenomenology's attempt to ground knowledge in absolute foundations. His celebrated essays on the devil, on the 'presence of myth,' on the 'revenge of the sacred in secular culture,' collected in The Presence of Myth (1972, English 1989) and Religion: If There Is No God... (1982), argued that the religious need — the human need for unconditional meaning, for a world that is not merely a collection of contingent facts but discloses an ultimate ground — is ineradicable from human existence.

Kołakowski did not conclude from this that religion is true in any straightforward metaphysical sense. His position is subtler: that the human condition is irreducibly characterized by the tension between the Socratic critical spirit (which dissolves every claim to absolute certainty) and the mythological need (which requires absolute orientations). Neither can be abolished: secular rationalism that believes it has definitively overcome the religious need has merely produced secular mythologies (progress, the nation, the proletariat) that are philosophically less honest than explicit religion.

Late Work and Legacy

Kołakowski's late essays, collected in Modernity on Endless Trial (1990) and Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal (1999), range across philosophy of culture, political philosophy, and the nature of modernity with characteristic irony, precision, and moral seriousness. He received the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities in 2003. He died in Oxford on July 17, 2009. His work remains central to understanding the intellectual history of the twentieth century, the critique of totalitarianism, and the philosophy of religion.