Requiescat in Pace, Leszek Kolakowski

Who was Leszek Kolakowski? Read this obituary. Here's something to get you started:

Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who rejected Marxism and helped inspire the Solidarity movement in his native land while living in exile, died Friday in Oxford, England. He was 81.

In Warsaw, Parliament held a moment of silence in his honor, for his service to Poland's freedom.

In a long and wide-ranging career, Mr. Kolakowski most famously dissected the intellectual underpinnings of the Communist system he had supported as a young man, at the height of the cold war’s ideological and military arms race. He was an academic whose influence reached far beyond the academy’s gates and a scholar whose writings could be playful and satirical, but most of all, accessible.

. . . His most influential work, the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution,” published in the 1970s, was a history and critique that called the philosophy “the greatest fantasy of our century.” He argued that Stalinism was not a perversion of Marxist thought, but rather its natural conclusion.

Godspeed, sir.