Prof. Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)“We receive this news with great pain and sorrow,” said Rector of Warsaw University, Katarzyna Chalasinska-Macukow. “This is a big loss not just for Poland but for the world.”
Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm, stopped debating, Friday, to pay the distinguished intellectual a minute’s silence in his memory.
Kolakowski’s
Main Currents of Marxism (1978) became a standard academic text in universities the world over and he was awarded Poland’s highest honour, the White Eagle, for services to the history of ideas.
Kolakowski was born in Radom, central Poland in 1927. He took his degree at Lodz University and his doctorate in Warsaw University where he later led the history of philosophy departament.
Originally a member of the communist Polish United Workers Party he became disillusioned and joined a growing band of revisionist Marxists. After being thrown out of the party and losing his post at Warsaw University, Kolakowski was convinced that Stalinism was the logical conclusion of Marxism and not its aberration, as was the line in many communist parties in Europe and elsewhere.
From the late 1960s he worked in universities in the US, and UK, where he was a prominent academic at Oxford University. He is thought to be a major intellectual inspiration to the opposition to communism in Poland.
(pg)