Despite being in exile, Kołakowski was a major inspiration for the Solidarity movement that flourished in Poland in the 1980s[2] and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to his being described by Bronisław Geremek as the "awakener of human hopes".

For example, he began his Main Currents of Marxism with an analysis of the contribution that various forms of ancient and medieval Platonism made, centuries later, to the Hegelian view of history.

In the work, he criticized the laws of dialectical materialism for being fundamentally flawed and found some of them being "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means" but others being just "nonsense".

[14] Nevertheless, although human fallibility implies that we ought to treat claims to infallibility with scepticism, our pursuit of the higher (such as truth and goodness) is ennobling.

In 1965, Kołakowski, Maria Ossowska and Tadeusz Kotarbiński drew up a report on the meaning of the concept of message, which was used by the defence in the trial of Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski who were charged by the communist authorities with "propagating false information" in their Open Letter to the Party.

[18] His 1971 essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness (full title: In Stalin's Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair),[19][20] which suggested that self-organized social groups could gradually expand the spheres of civil society in a totalitarian state, helped to inspire the dissident movements of the 1970s that led to Solidarity and eventually to the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and land for peasants.

What in the twentieth century perhaps comes closest to the working class revolution were the events in Poland of 1980-81: the revolutionary movement of industrial workers (very strongly supported by the intelligentsia) against the exploiters, that is to say, the state.

And this solitary example of a working class revolution (if even this may be counted) was directed against a socialist state, and carried out under the sign of the cross, with the blessing of the Pope.

His writings, lectures and TV appearances encouraged people to ask questions, even the most banal ones, and praised the figure of a jester in philosophy – somebody who is "not afraid to challenge even our strongest assumptions and maintains a healthy distance towards everything.

[33][34][26] When announcing the inaugural laureate of the prize, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, emphasized not only Kolakowski’s scholarship but also his "demonstrable importance to major political events in his own time," adding that “his voice was fundamental for the fate of Poland, and influential in Europe as a whole.