Leszek Kolakowski and the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas

This paper - a translation of a talk given at the University of Sydney in 1984 - focuses on the worldview and methodology of the so-called 'Warsaw school of history of ideas', represented in 1960s by Leszek Kolakowski, Bronislaw Baczko and the author of the paper. The origin of ideas shared by these historians of philosophy is to be found in a specifically Polish version of Marxist revisionism that rejects the dogmatic theory of dialectical Marxism and tries to transform the historical materialism into a kind of hermeneutics showing multiple historical determinations of cognition and lack of justification for any attempts to represent a single and unique objective truth. This was of course directed against the official theory of 'scientific worldview' and 'scientific socialism'.