ABSTRACT
What marks Vladimir Lenin off from most theorists who claimed to have inherited the Marxian mantle is that Lenin was above all a twentieth century man who inherited problems of a nineteenth century autocracy. It is difficult to present a synthetic capsule of Lenin's approach to the problems of war and peace, or his political philosophy generally, because of the polemical and practical nature of his work. Lenin's theoretical commitments reveal continuity with other theories of war and peace in his conscious effort to relate moral judgment to the actual functioning of international and civil strife. A brief examination of the component parts of the term historical materialism should yield a more exact understanding of the Marxian approach to war and peace. The integration of history and materialism markedly differentiates Lenin from the historical idealism of Alfred North Whitehead, with process culminating in the Harmonic Reality of Pure Spirit.
