Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009).
Kołakowski was one of the great philosophers and essayists of the twentieth century—and, despite living in exile after 1968, a hero of anti-communist resistance in his home country. After the fall of the Polish People’s Republic in 1989, Kołakowski was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration. His death made the nation’s front pages. He was buried with military honors and recognized with a minute’s silence in parliament. Yet, in his three adoptive countries—Canada, the United States, and Britain, where he settled for the last four decades of his life—he remains mostly unknown.
Insofar as people have heard of Kołakowski, it is usually for his vast, three-volume history and critique of Marxism, Main Currents of Marxism, published in Polish between 1976 and 1978 and in English translation in 1978. It is considered by many to be the devastating final word on communism. Unfortunately, this has led to a tendency to treat Kołakowski as a single-issue thinker: a former-communist-turned-critic who contributed heroically to the philosophical dismantling of Marxism, but whose ideas are largely irrelevant to the problems we face today.
This is a great mistake.
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