Aleksander Smolar

Aleksander Smolar (born 10 December 1940 in Białystok) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation.

He continued his studies, serving as a research assistant to Włodzimierz Brus in the Political Economy Department at Warsaw University.

He was removed from the party for publicly defending Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish revisionist Marxist philosopher who was critical of Marxism–Leninism.

Smolar took part in the March 1968 events, a series of protests by students and young factory workers against the repressive nature of the communist party in Poland.

He serves on the board of the European Council on Foreign Relations and is a vice president of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.