Leszek Kolakowski: Polish-born philosopher and writer who produced seminal critical analyses on Marxism and religion

(AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher, who died on 17 July at the age of 81, had an extraordinary and exceptional breadth of vision.

Born in Radom in 1927 into a middle-class family, he was unable to complete his secondary education, as during the German wartime occupation of Poland both he and his family suffered considerable privation. His father was arrested and killed by the Gestapo. In 1945 the young Kolakowski joined the Polish Communist Party which was soon to merge with the left-wing socialists of the PPS, to form the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP). He studied at the universities of Warsaw and Lódz, completing a doctorate on Baruch Spinoza in 1953, in which he viewed Spinoza from a Marxist point of view. Soon, however, he embraced Revisionism (attacking dogmatic, ossified Marxism-Leninism) and, during a long post-Marxist period, produced a body of work which does not fit easily into any Western philosophical "school". Apart from books and essays on pure philosophy, he wrote seminal texts on the history of religion and philosophy, as well as fables addressing political, philosophical and cultural problems of a world divided by the Cold War. In 1959 he obtained a Chair of Modern Philosophy at the University of Warsaw which he held until 1968. It was in that year, as a result of the so-called "anti-Revisionist, anti-Zionist" campaign, that he had to leave Poland – his wife, Tamara, being of Jewish origin – not "escaping" from his homeland as some of his biographers assert, but with an invitation from McGill University, Montreal. Prior to his leaving, political attacks against him, on account of a speech he made at the University of Warsaw in 1966, had became so virulent that having lost his teaching position and with his publications banned, he could foresee no future for himself in communist Poland. After a year at McGill (1968-69) and a one-year spell at the University of California, Kolakowski became Senior Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1970, a post he held until his retirement.

For my generation, Kolakowski was already a household name as early as 1956/57 when he first published his incisive articles and essays in such "Revisionist" Polish weeklies as Po Prostu and Nowa Kultura. Essays entitled "Responsibility and History" and "Intellectuals and the Communist Movement", later collected in Marxism and Beyond (1968), were memorable analyses of the gap between Marxist theory and Stalinist practice, stating, among other things, that "a communist movement that subordinates its ideology to immediate tactics is destined for degeneration and defeat". Basically, Kolakowski tried "to provide Marxism with a humanistic perspective", an effort that in the long run was doomed to failure.

Whatever hopes the Polish Left might have had about a more open-minded socialist system in October 1956, had all evaporated by 1966. In the aforementioned speech made by Kolakowski at Warsaw University, he summed up the shortcomings of the Gomulka regime, drawing up a negative balance-sheet of the past ten years. As a result, he lost his Party membership, an exclusion which launched an avalanche of resignations of many writer friends from the PUWP, including Andrzej Braun, Tadeusz Konwicki and Wiktor Woroszylski, though Kolakowski did not lose his academic post until some time later.

Between 1956 and 1968, when he left the country, Kolakowski published several books and a large number of impressive essays. In 1958, Jednostka i nieskonczonosc: Wolnosc i antynomie wolnosci w filozofii Spinozy (The Individual and the Infinite: Freedom and Antinomies of Freedom in Spinoza's Philosophy) was published, followed in 1965 by Swiadomosc religijna i wiez koscielna: Studia nad chrzescijanstwem bezwyznaniowym siedemnastego wieku (Religious Consciousness and Church Ties: Studies in the Non-Denominational Christianity of the Seventeenth Century). His essay "The Priest and the Jester", which was originally published in a Warsaw literary review in 1959, was very influential, mapping out possibilities of dissension within the communist regime. During this period Kolakowski also wrote "philosophical" (covertly political) as well as biblical tales, collected in two slim books in 1963 and 1964 respectively. These demonstrated not only his wry sense of humour, but also his great skill of getting the better of the Polish censor, who was, though less severe than his Russian counterpart, still watching "subversive" authors very closely.

It was a selection of writings from this wide-ranging philosophical- literary oeuvre published in Poland that comprised the anthology A Leszek Kolakowski Reader, co-edited by George Gömöri and the philosopher George L Kline (Tri-Quarterly, 22. Fall 1971), published in the US soon after Kolakowski's emigration. In this anthology, apart from essays such as "Ethics Without a Moral Code" and "An Epistemology of the Striptease" (which investigates the consequences of Original Sin), we also find "A Stenographic Report of the Devil's Metaphysical Press Conference", in which the Devil answers questions posed by journalists, in a half-ironic way, justifying his own existence.

During his career in Oxford, Kolakowski continued to show interest and devoted much time to the problem of religious faith. While he would have disagreed with the extreme view held by some rationalists that "there is no need for a God", he pointed out the difficulty inherent in Christianity between reconciling an omnipotent "objective" God who had withdrawn from the world, with a personalised, benign one. In fact, his book Religion (1982), written in English, was translated in 1987 into Polish as Jesli Boga nie ma... (If There Is No God...). Another one of his widely translated essays has the title "Whether the Devil Can Be Saved?"

In 1978, in Oxford, Kolakowski published Main Currents of Marxism, a three-volume work expressing his final views on Marxism. It is not only a masterly historical analysis of the ideology, which having started out as a critical theory of society changed into a Utopian creed, but also Kolakowski's farewell to what he describes as "the greatest fantasy of our century". Even though Kolakowski had dropped his Revisionist agenda, he remained an advocate of cautious social and political reforms. Those who believe that Solidarity's program in 1980 was to some extent influenced by Kolakowski's views on what is possible within a one-party system, are not mistaken.

Leszek Kolakowski wrote in four languages, communicating well in German, French and English, as well as in his native Polish. While at Oxford, he was also able to act as Guest Professor at the University of Chicago, but as the climate of the American Mid-West did not agree with his health, in the long run he preferred his Oxford (Summertown) residence. After the collapse of communism in 1990, Kolakowski became a popular author in Poland, often appearing on television, and his Mini-wyklady o maksi-sprawach (Mini-Lectures on Large Issues, 1997) became a bestseller in his native land. His many academic honours include an honorary doctorate from the University of Lódz and one from the Central European University in Budapest. His life achievement was recognised in 2003, when he received the $1m Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress.

George Gömöri

Leszek Kolakowski, philosopher, essayist: born Radom, Poland October 23 1927; married 1949 Tamara (one daughter); died Oxford 17 July, 2009.