Leszek Kołakowski

Works

• 1972The Presence of Myth

  Even rational culture depends on myths that give the world meaning and value; written in 1966, published in Paris in 1972.

• 1976Main Currents of Marxism

  Three volumes (1976–78) on the origins, golden age and breakdown of Marxism, from its roots in Neoplatonism and Hegel to Stalinism and its critics.

Position

Kołakowski’s path runs from Marxist orthodoxy through revisionism to a liberal and sceptical position. In the 1950s he argued for a Marxism without dogma; in the essay “The Priest and the Jester” (1959) he contrasted the priest, guardian of the absolute, with the jester who questions every certainty, and sided with the jester. His studies of Spinoza and of non-confessional Christians of the seventeenth century (1965) brought the history of religion into the centre of his work. “Main Currents of Marxism” (1976–78) traces Marxism from its roots in Neoplatonic and Hegelian ideas of salvation to its breakdown and argues that Stalinism was not a mere distortion of Marx but one possible, and not arbitrary, interpretation of his doctrine; it became a standard reference. E. P. Thompson’s “Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski” (1973) accused him of abandoning the socialist tradition, and Kołakowski replied with “My Correct Views on Everything” (1974); Marxist reviewers also found his treatment of Western Marxism, from the Frankfurt School to Althusser, dismissive. In later books – “The Presence of Myth” (1972), “Religion” (1982), “Metaphysical Horror” (1988), “God Owes Us Nothing” (1995) – he defended the legitimacy of religious questions without claiming to answer them.

Life & context

Leszek Kołakowski was born on 23 October 1927 in Radom. During the German occupation he could not attend a regular secondary school and studied largely on his own and in clandestine classes. After the war he studied philosophy in Łódź, joined the communist Polish Workers’ Party and became a combative Marxist critic of Catholic philosophy. He took his doctorate in Warsaw in 1953 with a study of Spinoza and taught at the University of Warsaw, from 1959 holding the chair of the history of philosophy. After 1956 he became a leading voice of the revisionist critique of Stalinism. In 1966 he was expelled from the party for a speech on the tenth anniversary of the Polish October, and in March 1968 he was dismissed from the university. He left Poland, taught at McGill University and at Berkeley, and from 1970 was a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; he also taught at Yale and Chicago. From exile he supported the democratic opposition, including the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) and Solidarity. He received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1977), the Erasmus Prize (1983) and the first Kluge Prize (2003). He died in Oxford on 17 July 2009.

Further main works

• Individual and Infinity (Jednostka i nieskończoność, 1958)
• The Priest and the Jester (Kapłan i błazen, 1959)
• Religious Consciousness and Church Bond (Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna, 1965)
• God Owes Us Nothing (1995)