Abstract

The story of Soviet Marxism that Joravsky tells is both fascinating and frightening. Briefly examining the background in Marx and Engel, he shows how their views toward the philosophy of natural science are ambiguous, containing a mixture of metaphysical and positivistic elements. Lenin's legacy was also ambiguous. Though he elaborated the concept of partiinost--the ideological control of philosophy by the Party's Central Committee--he himself used it broadly, tolerating and encouraging the separation of philosophic disputes from practical political affairs. Tracing the emergence of various factions after Lenin's death, we see how, under Stalin, dialectical materialism eventually became "a ritualistic incantation of the one true Weltanschauung that inspired the one true Party."--R. J. B.