Leszek Kołakowski (born 23 october , 1927 in Radom, Poland) is a Polish philosopher.

Due to the German occupation of Poland he did not attend school, but read books with occasional private lessons and took his final exams as an external student in the underground school system. He eventually studied philosophy in Łódź and earned his doctorate from Warsaw University in 1953, later becoming a professor and chairman of its section on the history of philosophy (1959-68). An orthodox Marxist at first, he was sent by the party in 1950 to Moscow on a course for promising communist intellectuals. It was there that he initially became aware of "the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system."

Stalin's death in 1953 had the effect of splitting the party ranks with some calling for democratization. Many deaths resulted from the June 1956 worker's riots in Poznań. In October of that year the communist party of Poland chose Golulka as its leader despite Moscow's objections. By then Kołakowski had by then become one of Poland's leading revisionist Marxists. His publication of "What Is Socialism?" -- a short, incisive critique of Stalinism -- was banned in Poland, but circulated privately and was translated into English the next year. Disillusioned with the stagnation of communism, he became increasingly outspoken. He was expelled from the party in 1966, dismissed from his professorship two years later, and went into exile. But his works, appearing in underground editions, continued to shape the opinions of the Polish intellectual opposition. His essay "Theses on Hope and Hopelessness," in the Paris Polish-language journal Kultura (1971) proposed an evolutionary strategy designed to weaken the system. His concept inspired the activities of the Committee for the Defense of Workers and of the "Flying University ," of which Kołakowski was a foreign member.

Kołakowski left Poland and became a visiting professor in the department of philosophy at McGill University in 1968. In 1969 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. In [[1970] he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He's been based at Oxford ever since, but he did spend part of 1974 at Yale, and from 1981 to 1994 was a professor part-time in the Committee on Social Thought and the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has been a fellow of scholarly societies in many countries and has received numerous academic honors and awards.

In 2003 the Library of Congress awarded him the first one million dollar Kluge Prize for the Humanities.

Kołakowski's books long appeared in Poland in underground editions, playing a prominent role in shaping the Polish intellectual opposition.

See also: Law of the Infinite Cornucopia