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Leszek Kolakowski is a philosopher who has always put greater stock in the questions asked than in the answers. He is a major public intellectual whose exceptional intellectual and moral integrity has allowed him to change his views, as demonstrated by the trajectory of his own life and thought, much of which was closely tied to political developments in post-war Poland. He began as a young philosopher enthusiastic about the promise of Marxism, became chair of Warsaw University's Philosophy Department but also the regime's harshest revisionist critic, and eventually concluded after hard experience that a democratic communism would be like "fried snowballs". In fact it was Kolakowski, expelled from the Party and the University but welcomed by Oxford, who formulated the idea of self-organized social groups that could gradually and peacefully expand the spheres of civil society within a totalitarian state. This idea directly inspired Poland's dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and the eventual collapse in 1989 of the communists' monopoly on power.

Kolakowski's more than 30 books range from the monumental Main Currents of Marxism to his playfully wide-ranging Mini Lectures on Maxi Matters. Czeslaw Milosz has described Kolakowski as "a good example of the return to the mores of the Enlightenment, when a philosopher did not withdraw into an ivory tower but waged war on the creeds of his contemporaries", which, adds Milosz, he does with "Voltairian irony". Comparisons to Voltaire may be warranted not only in his philosophy but perhaps even in his physiognomy.

Kolakowski lives in Oxford and is currently a Visiting Fellow at Claremont-McKenna College.