Leszek Kolakowski was the first recipient of the million-dollar John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and he is the recipient of the 2007 Jerusalem Prize. He lives in Oxford, England. P. S. Falla is an English translator who has brought books over from many languages including French and Polish.

"Considered the definitive work on the subject" (The New York Times), Main Currents of Marxism is now in one paperback volume. "A monument of modern humanistic scholarship... It will surely not be superseded." New York Review of Books "Leszek Kolokowki is one of the world's greatest living political philosophers and historians of ideas... Norton have reissued his magnum opus, Main Currents of Marxism, in a handsome single volume." Timothy Garton Ash, Books of the Year, The Times Literary Supplement "...indispensable... an unmatched encyclopaedia of a major passage in Western intellectual history, but the enduring interest of this masterly volume does not come chiefly from the mass of useful information it provides. Instead, it lies in Kolokowski's devastating assessment of Marx's thought." John Gray, The Times Higher Education Supplement"