It was with great pleasure that we read the announcement last month that the Polish philosopher (and occasional contributor to The New Criterion) Leszek Kolakowski had been awarded the first Kluge Prize. The new prize, which carries a purse of $1 million, is funded by the philanthropist John W. Kluge and administered by the Library of Congress. Designed to honor lifetime achievement in the humanities, the prize could not have found a more worthy recipient. Although best known for Main Currents of Marxism, a monumental three-volume dissection of “the greatest fantasy of our century,” Kolakowski is also the author of a score of books on philosophical and theological topics from Plotinus and the Church fathers, to the English empiricists, Edmund Husserl, and Henri Bergson. The seventy-six-year-old philosopher grew up in Lodz and lived through German occupation and Soviet domination of Poland. In 1968, having lost his position at W ...

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