Famous Polish Philosopher Theoretician of European Culture
Leszek Kołakowski
Was Rewarded with the John W. Kluge Prize

The first John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (1million dollars), the new reward of the Library of Congress went to Leszek Kołakowski, 76 famous Polish philosopher. In announcing the award, Dr. Billington commented: Very rarely can one identify a deep, reflective thinker who has had such a wide range of inquiry and demonstrable importance to major political events in his own time. Out of deep scholarship and relentless inquiry, Leszek Kołakowski made clear from within the Soviet system the intellectual bankruptcy of the Marxist ideology, and the necessity of freedom, tolerance of diversity and the search for transcendence for reestablishing individual dignity. His voice was fundamental for the fate of Poland, and influential in Europe as a whole. In addition to his sustained anti-dogmatic philosophical inquiries, he writes essays that are readable, provocative, and sometimes ironic and humorous. With charm, resourcefulness and gentle self-mockery, he raises questions about the sometimes mindless modernity of contemporary Europe and North America. He is a true humanist: philosopher, intellectual historian and cultural critic. Throughout his creative life he has asked big questions with the kind of intellectual honesty and depth that we have sought to honor with the John W. Kluge Prize.

Leszek Kołakowski has had a tremendous impact on a Polish transformation being one of those, who laid fundaments for the Solidarity movement, which finally toppled communism in Poland and gave boost to do the same in the rest part of the former Soviet block. As put by Bronisław Geremek, former Polish Foreign Minister and one of the “founding fathers” of Solidarity: This skeptical student of enlightenment thought, this scholar of the highest intellectual rigor, this opponent of illusions, played the most romantic and Promethean of roles. He was the awakener of human hopes.

According to critics, as they are quoted by Library of Congress, Kołakowski’s defense of the human instinct for the transcendent has been an important challenge to the stifling secularism that ignores the experience of the overwhelming majority of humankind.

Professor Kołakowski is the author of more than 30 books and 400 other writings. His principal lines of inquiry have been in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion.