Philosopher who loathed Stalinism:FROM THE confines of a number of academic armchairs, on either side of the Iron Curtain, Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish-born philosopher and one-time communist, who has died at the age of 81, understood better than most the true nature of communism in practice.
He had joined the Polish Workers’ party – as the communists called themselves – while a teenager as it took power after the second World War, and went on to become one of its most distinguished luminary teachers.
Twenty-three years later, as he began to speak out at the time of the Prague Spring of 1968, his ideas were so trenchant that he was forced to leave the party and his home country to start a new life, teaching on related themes in Britain and the US.
But even in exile, it was soon apparent that his deeply critical views got through to his homeland and remained hugely influential. Adam Michnik, one of the leading intellectuals of the Solidarity era, writing from his prison cell, described him as one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture.
Kolakowski’s great strength as a philosopher and historian, and therefore his most serious crime, was that he had been a practising and highly influential party member during the Stalin era.
He knew the party intimately from the inside, and by the late 1950s was teaching up-and-comers at the party school and editing its publications.
Only 10 years after leaving Poland, he observed that the Soviet-imposed regime had, in fact, proved less effective in Poland than elsewhere in eastern Europe, for the simple reason that Poles had always been sceptical of Russian ideas. Looking back at the events of the “Polish October” of 1956, he commented that the country’s then political leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, had, in effect, lost control, and the hoped-for “social and cultural renewal” had failed. “The October events,” he wrote in 1976, “started a process of reversal”.
In another essay, published in 1971, he declared that “intellectuals are necessary to communism as people who are free in their thinking and superfluous as opportunists. Theoretical work cannot be useful to the revolutionary movement if it is controlled by anything besides scientific stringency and the striving for true knowledge.”
Even in his youth, Kolakowski, born in Radom, south of Warsaw, of well-to-do parents, was precocious and independent in his thinking. The war and Nazi occupation badly disrupted his formal schooling, which meant that when he was not ensconced in the family library, he was obliged to take private lessons, as well as examinations, underground.
Not long after he became a member of the Polish Workers’ party he joined the teaching staff of Lodz University, moving on to Warsaw University in 1950.
He gained his doctorate there in 1953 – with a thesis on the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza – and until 1959 was professor and chief administrator of that university’s department of philosophy, and then head of the modern philosophy department.
Kolakowski was soon disseminating his ideas to a younger generation through key positions on the journal Nowa Kultura, and on a weekly newspaper organised by the university’s young communists. It was in this period, as the Polish political leadership launched a new constitution, that he witnessed and began seriously to reflect upon and, more significantly, to write about the influence of Stalinism.
It was a fertile if repressive time to be planting his ideas. Writers and artists chose the time of the “Polish October”, as their Czechoslovak counterparts did in Prague in the late 1960s, to experiment in the way they expressed themselves.
Repeatedly, Kolakowski would emphasise what he saw as the moral dimensions and the humanist potential of Marxism, fusing the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre with those of Stalin. In one notable essay, purporting to be a dialogue between a priest and a jester, he gave his backing to the jester. The inevitable result, which was to distinguish him for the rest of his life, was that he became known as a revisionist.
The crunch came in late 1966 when he spoke out on the 10th anniversary of the “October”. For his pains on this occasion, as a rationalist and moral thinker, he was thrown out of the party and, two years later, sacked by the university.
Between 1968 and 1981 his name was on Poland’s index of forbidden authors. Provoked further by anti-Jewish gestures against Tamara, his Jewish wife, he left the country to start a new life, teaching first at McGill University, Montreal, and later at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1970 he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he wrote his best-known work, the three-volume Main Currents of Marxism(1978), considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century.
From this time on, his writings would take on religious as well as political themes. He engaged willingly, and fluently, in debate with distinguished western thinkers on the nature of ethics and 20th-century philosophies, on the nature of good and evil, and on how political regimes could accommodate such deviations.
In his final years he became widely respected, winning accolades in many parts of the world, from Poland to the US. He was best known perhaps for his idea that the cruelties of Stalinism were not an aberration but a natural product of Marxism, but he wrote more than 25 books on a wide variety of themes.
He is survived by Tamara and their daughter.
Leszek Kolakowski: born October 23rd 1927; died July 17th 2009