Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski
Born (1927-10-23)October 23, 1927
Radom, Poland
Died July 17, 2009(2009-07-17) (aged 81)
Oxford, England
Era 20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
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Leszek Kołakowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century.

"The three volumes progress chronologically from Karl Marx's lifetime to the years after Stalin's death. The third volume looks at what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century and makes a particular example of the career of Georg Lukacs - "Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how Marxism affected everything at the mental level." [1][2]


Biography

Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland. Owing to the German occupation of Poland 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 and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University, with a thesis on Spinoza. He was a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968.

In his youth, Kołakowski was a precocious intellect, and became a devout communist. In the period 1947-1966, he was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow, where he saw the future 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.[3] He lost his job at Warsaw University, was expelled from the Polish United Workers' Party, and was prevented from obtaining any other academic post.[4]

Kołakowski came to believe that the totalitarian cruelty of Stalinism was not an aberration, but instead a logical end product of Marxism, whose genealogy he examined in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, his major work published in 1976-1978, which won him international renown.[5]

Kolakowski became increasingly fascinated by the contribution which theological assumptions make to Western, and, in particular, modern thought, and defended the role which freedom plays in the human quest for the transcendent. His The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia asserts that, for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it. Nevertheless, while human fallibility implies that we ought to treat claims to infallibility with scepticism, our pursuit of the higher (such as truth and goodness) is ennobling.

In 1968, Kołakowski became a visiting professor in the department of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and in 1969 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He remained mostly at Oxford, although he spent part of 1974 at Yale University, and from 1981 to 1994 was a part-time professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Although his works were officially banned in Poland, underground copies of them influenced the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition. His 1971 essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness, which suggested that self-organized social groups could gradually expand the spheres of civil society in a totalitarian state, helped to inspire the dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and, eventually, to the collapse of Communism in Europe in 1989. In the 1980s, Kołakowski supported Solidarity by giving interviews, writing and fund-raising.

In Poland, Kołakowski is not only revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas, but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".[6][7]

Kołakowski died in July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England.

Awards

In 1986, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Kołakowski for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Kołakowski's lecture, "The Idolatry of Politics",[8] includes Kołakowski's much quoted aphorism, "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".[9]

In 2003, the Library of Congress named Kołakowski the first winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities.[10][11]

Other awards: the German Booksellers Peace Prize, 1977; Erasmus Prize, 1980; Veillon Foundation European Prize for the Essay, 1980; MacArthur Award, 1982; University of Chicago Press Gordon J. Laing Award, 1991; Tocqueville Prize, 1994.

Bibliography

Awards

See also

References

  1. ^ Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p.357
  2. ^ "Polish anti-Marxist thinker dies", Adam Easton, BBC News, 17 July 2009
  3. ^ Foreign News: VOICE OF DISSENT, TIME Magazine, October 14, 1957
  4. ^ Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p.353
  5. ^ Polish philosopher and author Kołakowski dead at 81, Gareth Jones, Reuters, Jul 17, 2009
  6. ^ Adam Michnik, "Letter from the Gdansk Prison," New York Review of Books, July 18, 1985.
  7. ^ Norman Davies, "True to Himself and His Homeland," New York Times, October 5, 1986.
  8. ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
  9. ^ Leszek Kołakowski, "The Idolatry of Politics," reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1990, paperback edition 1997), ISBN 0-226-45045-7, ISBN 0-226-45046-5, ISBN 978-0-226-45046-9, p. 158.
  10. ^ "Library of Congress Announces Winner of First John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences"
  11. ^ Leszek Kołakowski, "What the Past is For" (speech given on November 5, 2003, on the occasion of the awarding of the Kluge Prize to Kołakowski).

External links

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