Leszek Kolakowski

(1927 - 2009)

Best known for his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski left Poland in 1968 to become a senior research fellow at Oxford. “It would be silly, of course,” he wrote in an essay, “to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.”