Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kołakowski
Born	October 23, 1927 Radom, Poland
Died	July 17, 2009 Oxford, England
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy

Leszek Kołakowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He was 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."

Biography

Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland. Owing to the German occupation of Poland in World War II, he did not attend school but read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his final 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 section on 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 Polish United Workers' Party. His intellectual promise earned him a trip to Moscow, where he observed the future and found it repulsive. He broke with Stalinism, becoming a "revisionist Marxist" and advocating a humanist interpretation of Marx. This led to his losing his job at Warsaw University, and his expulsion from the Polish United Workers' Party - ejected from the Communist Party in 1966 and expelled from academic life in 1968.

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.

Eventually, Kołakowski came to believe that the totalitarian cruelty of Stalinism was not an aberration, but instead the 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.

He became increasingly fascinated by the contribution that Christianity makes to Western, and, in particular, modern thought, and sought to defend the role that freedom plays in our pursuit of the transcendent. He asserted that 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 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 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, Kolakowski 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".

The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia, put forth by Kołakowski suggests that for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.

Kolakowski 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", 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".

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

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

• Klucz niebieski, albo opowieści budujące z historii świętej zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze (The Key to Heaven), 1957
• 13 bajek z królestwa Lailonii dla dużych i małych (Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and the Key to Heaven), 1963
• Rozmowy z diablem (US title: Conversations with the Devil / UK title: Talk of the Devil; reissued with The Key to Heaven under the title The Devil and Scripture, 1973), 1965
• Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna, 1965
• Od Hume'a do Koła Wiedeńskiego (the 1st edition:The Alienation of Reason, translated by Norbert Guterman, 1966/ later as Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle),
• Kultura i fetysze (Toward a Marxist Humanism, translated by Jane Zielonko Peel, and Marxism and Beyond), 1967
• A Leszek Kołakowski Reader, 1971
• Positivist Philosophy, 1971
• TriQuartely 22, 1971
• Obecność mitu (The Presence of Myth), 1972
• ed. The Socialist Idea, 1974 (with Stuart Hampshire)
• Husserl and the Search for Certitude, 1975
• Główne nurty marksizmu (Main Currents of Marxism), 1976 (3 vols.)
• Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań, 1982
• Religion: If There Is No God, 1982
• Bergson, 1985
• Le Village introuvable, 1986
• Metaphysical Horror, 1988 (revised edition, 2001)
• Pochwała niekonsekwencji, 1989 (ed. by Zbigniew Menzel)
• Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych, 1990 (ed. by Paweł Kłoczowski)
• Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press), 1990
• God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, 1995
• Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life, 1999
• The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on Philosophers, 2004
• My Correct Views on Everything, 2005
• Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, 2007

Awards

• Jurzykowski Prize (1969)
• Veillon Foundation European Prize for the Essay (1980) (for all his work)
• Erasmus Prize (1983)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1983)
• Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986)
• Award of the Polish Pen Club (1988)
• Gordon J. Laing Award (1991)
• Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress (2004)
• St. George Medal (2006)
• Jerusalem Prize (2007)
• Democracy Service Medal (2009)

See also

• Law of the Infinite Cornucopia
• Adam Schaff
• History of philosophy in Poland
• List of Poles
• Polish British

External links

• Leszek Kolakowski - Daily Telegraph obituary
• - The Times (London) Obituary
• Polish Philosophy Page: Bibliography, at the Internet Archive
• Leszek Kolakowski notebook, by Cosma Shalizi
• My Correct Views On Everything: A Rejoinder to Edward Thompson's "Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski, Socialist Register 1974
• How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist
• The Alienation of Reason (Extract)
• The Death of Utopia Reconsidered
• Judt, Tony. "Goodbye to All That?" in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, No. 14, September 21, 2006 (review-essay on Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown by Leszek Kołakowski, translated from the Polish by P.S. Falla. Norton, 2005, ISBN 0393060543; My Correct Views on Everything by Leszek Kolakowski, edited by Zbigniew Janowski. St. Augustine's, 2004, ISBN 1587315254; Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde by Jacques Attali. Paris: Fayard, 2005, ISBN 2213624917)
• Roger Kimball, Leszek Kolakowski and the Anatomy of Totalitarianism