The Talmud, the great compendium of ancient rabbinic sayings, rulings and commentary, has the unforgettable line, “When a sage dies all are his kin.” The passing of a wise man means that even those who did not know him must mourn his death. The line came back to me when I read that Leszek Kolakowski had died in the middle of July.

He was buried in Warsaw, but for the better part of his life he was an exile from his homeland, Poland. He escaped from the brutalities of the communist regime because he was a dissident communist. Isaiah Berlin and another Oxford don, Alan Montefiore, successfully planned the move to bring Kolakowski to All Souls College, Oxford, in 1970 as a fellow. It was in All Souls, and in McGill, Berkeley and Chicago that Kolakowski spent most of his working life, devoting himself to reading, writing and occasionally lecturing. He was a recluse even by the standards of an Oxford don. He once coined the famous saying that Britain is an island, within which Oxford is an island, within Oxford, All Souls is an island and in that island resides Isaiah Berlin. No major distortion would take place if one were to replace the name of Isaiah Berlin with that of Leszek Kolakowski.

He was born in Radom in Poland in 1927. His father was an economist and a political writer who was shot by the Nazis. The entire family was sent off to a village in eastern Poland. The young Kolakowski discovered there a library belonging to a minor nobleman and initiated the process of educating himself. Members of the Polish underground occasionally helped him with his education. It was perhaps inevitable, growing up under Nazi occupation, that Kolakowski should turn to communism, which offered to him an alternative to the Polish Roman Catholic Church as well. After the war, he joined the Polish communist party’s youth wing and studied philosophy at the University of Lodz. He took a doctorate degree from the University of Warsaw where he became professor of philosophy in 1964.

He was a member of the Polish communist party, but began increasingly to voice dissident opinions. His disillusionment with Soviet communism began with a visit to Moscow in 1950. He was to write later of “the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system”. He was the leading voice in Poland in the revolt against Stalinism after 1956, especially after October of that year and the ascendancy of Wladyslaw Gomulka as the leader of Polish communists and his declaration of provisional independence from Moscow.

Around this time, Kolakowski wrote What Socialism is Not, a tract that was banned but had wide underground circulation. He wrote there, “Socialism is not: a society in which one man is in trouble for saying what he thinks while another is well-off because he does not say what he has on his mind; a society in which a man lives better if he doesn’t have any thoughts of his own at all; a state which has more spies than nurses and more people in prison than in hospital; a state in which the philosophers and writers always say the same as the generals and ministers — but always after they have said it.’’

Such opinions became unacceptable in Poland particularly after Gomulka retreated from the promise of Polish October to the dominance of the Soviet Union. Kolakowski was denounced as a revisionist. He came under surveillance and was expelled from the party in 1966. He was expelled from Warsaw University in 1968. He was thus forced into a life of exile.

Let all those who once stood up against Stalinism recognize Kolakowski as their kin. Let all those who have felt the oppression carried out under the name of communism across the globe, from Albania to West Bengal, mourn the passing of Leszek Kolakowski.

It would be unfair, of course, to describe Kolakowski’s life and work only in political terms, important though his politics was. While living in Poland, he began his philosophical investigations. His first book, The Individual and Infinity, was a study of Spinoza. He wrote on positivism from Hume to the Vienna Circle; on Bergson and on Husserl. He was a close interrogator of Christianity and religion. In 1965, he published Religious Consciousness and the Church where he looked at 17th-century non-denominational Christianity and reconstructed the ideas of obscure thinkers, scattered all over Europe, who were devout Christians without embracing the orthodoxy of the church. In Oxford, he lectured on medieval philosophy and brought to life thinkers like Duns Scotus and Pascal. Kolakowski had a profound sensitivity for religious ideas. His studies had convinced him of the permanence of the religious phenomenon. He said once in an interview: “religious consciousness is an irreplaceable part of human culture… men have no fuller means of self-identification than through religious symbols.”

Kolakowski’s study of Christianity and medieval philosophy and his exposure to Stalinism left him sceptical about the notion of institutionalized “truth”. He was convinced that such a notion was dangerous in politics and unattainable in philosophy. In 1957, in an essay called “Responsibility and History”, he showed the consequences that have followed when “one messianic hope becomes the unique governor of life, the sole source of moral precepts and the only measure of virtue”. In another essay, “The Priest and the Jester” (1959), he pitted dogmatism against scepticism. He was for the jester, forever laughing at man’s attempts to arrive at Truth. He could laugh at his own calling and wrote, “A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”

Let all those who value scepticism and doubt in intellectual matters, all those who value the freedom of thought from the impositions of institutions mourn the passing of Leszek Kolakowski, for he was their kin.

The work for which Kolakowski is best known is Main Currents of Marxism in three volumes. This was an attempt to analyse “the strange fate of an idea which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin”. His point of view in this book, he wrote, was akin to that adopted by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus: to seek out the roots of a contradiction. In Mann’s case, the one between German culture and Nazism; for Kolakowski between the humanism of Marx and the horrors of Stalinism. Kolakowski was a master of the art of reconstructing intellectual arguments. As a scrupulous historian of ideas, he carried out a lucid and accurate exposition of the entire Marxist tradition and combined this with penetrating analysis. It marked a high point in the history of 20th-century scholarship.

At the end of the first volume, called “The Founders”, looking back at what Lenin inherited from Marx, Kolakowski wrote that “the despotic socialism of history is not socialism as Marx intended it”, but Marx’s doctrine was not entirely innocent of what Lenin and Stalin made of it. Marx, he wrote, visualized a unity of society as against a society of conflict based on classes and private property. It followed then that there was nothing reprehensible “in the idea that the act of violence which abolishes private property at the same time does away with the need for freedom tout court”. He concluded tellingly, “thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power, as ignominiously as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.’’

Let all those who own the original vision of Marx recognize Kolakowski as their kin. Let all those who value freedom mourn him.