Leszek Kolakowski, a great intellectual crusader against Communism, died on Friday at age 81. Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism was a fixture on the bookshelves of every 1980s conservative. (Mine was the three-volume paperback.) Marxism was, said Kolakowski, writing in the late 1970s,

the greatest fantasy of our century … [which] began in a Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin.

His writings, clandestinely circulated, were an inspiration to the Solidarity movement in Poland — the movement that, more than any other, hastened the demise of the Evil Empire.

Kolakowski was the enemy not only of Marxism but of all ideological and religious dogmatism. His guiding principles, once he had shed his own Marxism, were free inquiry and open, civilized debate. It sounds easy, but those principles are never really much honored anywhere, and entire societies can lose them for decades at a time. Kolakowski:

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.