ABSTRACT
Originally published in 1961. Russian Marxist philosophy of science originated among men and women who gave their whole lives to rebellion against established authority. The original tension within Marxist philosophy between positivism and metaphysics was repressed but not resolved in this first phase of Soviet Marxism. In this volume the author correlates the development of ideas with trends in the Cultural Revolution and against this background it is possible to understand why debates over general philosophy gave way to conflicts over specific sciences in the aftermath of the first Five Year Plan and why there was a genuine crisis in Soviet biology.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |44 pages
Part One The Pre-Revolutionary Heritage
chapter |21 pages
1 Orthodox Marxism And Natural Science
chapter |21 pages
2 Lenin And The Partyness Of Philosophy
part |45 pages
Part Two The Soviet Setting 1917–1929
chapter |15 pages
3 Intra-Party Politics And Philosophy
chapter |14 pages
4 The Cultural Revolution And ‘Bourgeois' Scientists
chapter |14 pages
5 The Cultural Revolution And Marxist Philosophers
part |139 pages
Part Three The Anomalous Rejection Of Positivism
chapter |14 pages
6 Mechanism As A Tendency
chapter |12 pages
7 The First Challenges To Mechanism, 1922–1924
chapter |13 pages
8 The Formation Of Factions, 1924–1926
chapter |18 pages
9 The Mechanist Faction: Propagandists And Philosophers
chapter |20 pages
10 The Mechanist Faction: Natural Scientists
chapter |14 pages
11 Deborin And His Students
chapter |14 pages
12 Deborinite Natural Scientists
chapter |7 pages
13 Social Theorists In The Deborinite Faction
chapter |10 pages
14 Closing The Controversy, 1926–1929
chapter |15 pages
15 ‘Classical' Authority And The Cultural Revolution
part |41 pages
Part Four The Great Break 1929–1932
chapter |17 pages
16 The Great Break For Natural Scientists
chapter |22 pages
17 The Great Break For Philosophers
part |42 pages
Part Five Physics And Biology In The First Phase 1917–1932