Leszek Kolakowski’s academic field was hard to pin down. He was at once philosopher, historian, theologian, political scientist and literary critic. As a philosopher he radically changed his views several times during his life in ways that reflected the postwar political developments of his native Poland.

He began as an enthusiastic Marxist, becoming chair of Warsaw University’s philosophy department. Later, he became one of the regime’s most outspoken revisionists, advocating a democratic, humanist Marxism. But he then rejected that too, concluding that a democratic communism would be like “fried snowballs”.

His thoughts led to his expulsion from the party and, later on, his sacking from his position at the university. He was forced to flee Poland in 1968, whereupon he took up an international career, teaching on both sides of the Atlantic, at Berkeley and Oxford. By that time he had ceased to regard himself as Marxist, and his professorship at Berkeley left him highly critical of the left wing, in particular of the student New Left.

Despite having a reputation for massive erudition, he was far from being an ivory tower academic. His ideas were often prescriptive, and he formulated the concept of constructing selforganised social groups that would gradually and peacefully expand the spheres of civil society within totalitarian states. Many believe that this directly inspired the dissident movements in Poland in the 1970s that led to Solidarity and the collapse of the communist monopoly of power in 1989.

Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland, in 1927. His father was a publicist, and in his youth he was often surrounded by books. He later recalled that when he was a boy, during the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, he spent a lot of time at a country house reading from its library. After the war he joined the Communist Youth Organisation (ZMP) and enrolled at the University of Lodz to study philosophy. He quickly excelled at his studies and went on to complete a doctorate at Warsaw University in 1953. He taught at Warsaw University from 1950 to 1959 and also at the Polish United Workers’ Party’s school until 1954. He was also a staff member of Po Prostu, a weekly run by communist intellectuals.

Stalin tightened his grip on Poland in 1952 and introduced a new constitution. Workers’ protests ensued and, by 1956, the calls for a relaxation in political repression had reached fever pitch. Kolakowski became one of the leading voices for democratisation in Poland, and the so-called October thaw brought an easing of some of the restrictions on cultural expression.

Although the basic political system had not changed, Polish poets and novelists soon took advantage of the new-found intellectual freedoms. In 1959 Kolakowski wrote an important essay, The Priest and the Jester, in which he confronted Marxist dogmatism with a sceptical eye that was symbolised by the character of the jester. Its publication made him the best-known philosopher in Poland at the time. With courageous indignation, he made thinly veiled criticisms of basic Marxist doctrines and, as a result, he was labelled as a revisionist.

Kolakowski became head of history of modern philosophy at the University of Warsaw in 1959. His career there did not run smoothly. His books were banned and, after a controversial speech that he made in 1966 on the tenth anniversary of the October thaw, he was expelled from the Polish United Workers’ Party. Two years later he was fired from the university, and he escaped from Poland in 1968 with his Jewish wife during the extreme nationalist campaign against “Zionists”. For the next 20 years it was forbidden to refer to his works.

In 1969 Kolakowski taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived at the height of 1960s left-wing US student radicalism. It was a considerable shock for him. The students’ views did not sit well with what he had experienced in Poland and his reputation as a left-wing thinker evaporated as quickly as his Marxist views.

He wrote then: “There are better arguments in favour of democracy and freedom than the fact that Marx is not quite so hostile to them as he first appears.”

Kolakowski’s criticism of the Left became increasingly trenchant as his career developed in the West. In 1978 he wrote three volumes called Main Currents in Marxism. It was a comprehensive overview of the movement and examined the origins and theory of dialectical materialism and his amazement at how communism had “become the rallying point for so many different and mutually hostile forces”.

His critique ran from the Classical philosopher Plotinus, whose work Kolakowski considered foundational, right through to Maoism. At the end of the epilogue of the third volume, he concluded: “At present, Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organise various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself.”