Zbigniew Pełczyński

Zbigniew Pełczyński (29 December 1925 – 22 June 2021) was a Polish-British political philosopher and academic. He taught politics at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1957 to 1992, and was later an Emeritus Fellow of the college. Pełczyński was instrumental in providing opportunities for scholars from Poland and other post-communist countries to study at British universities, especially at Oxford and Cambridge. He fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war, he settled in Britain and completed his D.Phil. thesis at Oxford University on Hegel's minor political works. Pełczyński was well known for being the politics tutor at Oxford University for future US President Bill Clinton. He also advised the Constitutional Committee of the Polish Sejm and was an advisor to the Chief of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland on government institutional reforms. In 1994, he founded the School for Young Social and Political Leaders in Warsaw.