perfect synthesis of its diversified and incompatible components. Its very richness is supported by this very incompatibility of its ingredients. And it is the conflict of values, rather than their harmony, that keeps our culture alive.

The Kluge Prize was created to recognize not only the accomplishments but "the trajectory" of a scholarly lifetime. For more than a half century, Professor Kolakowski's scholarship has analyzed and affirmed both the underlying values and the desirable diversity of the European heritage. He has been a "Theoretician of European culture" as the heading proclaimed over the bibliography of his previously banned works that was published in Poland as it was passing from communism to freedom in 1990.

Beginning in 1958 with The Individual and Infinity, a lengthy book on Spinoza, Kolakowski published aseries of major studies on a wide range of European philosophers: The Philosophy of Existence, the Defeat of Existence (1965), Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle (1966, reprinted 2003), Husserl and the Search for Certitude (1975), works on Bergson (1957 and 1984), and Metaphysical Horror in 1988. He was dealing sympathetically with the thought of, respectively, an unorthodox Dutch Jew, French existentialists, agnostic English and Austrian empiricists, a German phenomenologist, a French believer in intuition and "the life force," and those who seek divine answers for human concerns.

Kolakowski's early advocacy of Marxism placed him in initial opposition to traditional Polish Catholicism. But it was more in the spirit of Erasmus' Praise of Folly, than of Marxist atheism that he wrote his most famous early essay, "The