Leszek Kolakowski, who died in 2009, was an intellectual in the best sense of that word: a scholar of vast learning, a writer with a gift for the clear and felicitous expression of complex ideas, and a man who didn't overestimate his own importance. While he is usually labeled a philosopher, there is no philosophical system one could call "Kolakowskianism." He was more a historian of ideas than a philosopher in his own right; his greatest work, the three-volume "Main Currents of Marxism" (1978), is a demolition of a sham philosophy rather than the expression of a real one.

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