Preliminaries: Marx, Marxism and Ethics the relationship between Marxism and ethics is often alluded to and rarely explored. The disputes that surround it ...

The materialist interpretation of history dogmatically resolves all histories into one. Marx and Engels themselves thought philosophy progresses toward the ultimate truth of Marxism, and implicitly held all historical positions interesting since their development reveals contradictions generated by inadequacies. Bolshevik Marxism's official ideology does not include philosophy's dissolution. Marxist definitions of philosophy emphasizing correct conclusions neglect distinctively philosophical argument and method. The recent Soviet view of philosophy's history has changed from the history of superstructure to the history of conflicting materialist (...) and idealist theories, thereby conceding the centrality of philosophical ideas rather than trying to reduce them to class or economic interests. (shrink)

Soviet philosophy has no great reputation in the Western philosophical world. Physicists, mathematicians, geographers and geomorphologists, medical scientists and men working in certain branches of history and linguistics have found it profitable to follow the researches of their Soviet counterparts; philosophers have not. Academician Mitin, it is true, told the Soviet Academy of Sciences early in 1943 that ’philosophy has been raised to an unparalleled level in the Soviet Union, making the U.S.S.R. a country of high philosophical culture . Many (...) problems which are being argued by outstanding philosophers abroad have been solved here on the basis of dialectical materialism.” 1 To most non-Communists, Mitin's claim. (shrink)

Totalitarian, totalitarianism are twentieth‐century words. They are used to describe states, ideologies, leaders and political parties that aim at total transformation and control of their own societies or, at least, at total control of everything that is actually or potentially politically significant within those societies. More positively, ‘totalitarians’ may see themselves as promoting a total conception of life and an organically cohesive state and community. They have been accused of aiming, inevitably, at a total transformation of the world. Applied to (...) a whole society, ‘totalitarian’ is, quixotically, a success word – to call a society totalitarian is to suggest the ruler's control measures up to this programme. (shrink)