Bronisław Baczko

Bronisław Baczko (1924–2016) was a Polish-born philosopher and historian of ideas who spent much of his career in France and Switzerland. He is best known for his studies of the French Enlightenment and of utopia, subjects that shaped much of his later work.

He completed his studies in Warsaw in the early 1950s and taught in the philosophy department of the University of Warsaw from 1952 to 1968. His early books, written in Polish, examined French philosophy and Rousseau. Dismissed from his chair for political reasons, he emigrated to France, where he taught at Clermont-Ferrand and worked at the EHESS in Paris. He later held a professorship at the University of Geneva.

Much of his subsequent output appeared in French. His books on the French Revolution, such as Comment sortir de la terreur, and on the links between utopia and the Enlightenment legacy, such as Lumières de l'utopie, made him a leading reference in these fields. In 2011 he received the Balzan Prize for his work on the Age of Enlightenment.