The author places Herzen's view of history in the context of the development of West European political philosophy—in particular, the concepts of "open history" and "historicism.".

Marxism has relinquished the position of the ruling ideology in Russia without having been subjected to a fundamental critique. There was hardly time to boo it as it expired. The shelves in our libraries are still occupied by hundreds of books in which the Marxist-Leninist doctrine is introduced as the total fulfillment of the preceding social and philosophical thought. The tendentious construct of the history of philosophy that upholds this illusion has not been demolished to this day. People who teach, (...) study, or simply love philosophy fall, as before, into this trap. It has had a particularly strong influence on the reception of the German philosophical classics, which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lenin had already raised to the ideological rank of one of the immediate sources of Marxism. (shrink)

Looking back I count, not without some sadness, that I have been a reader of Voprosy filosofii for forty-five years, an author for almost forty, and a staff member for exactly ten. I hope that this entitles me to discuss briefly the most tempting of anniversarial problems; namely, the problem of periodization.

Contrary to the widespread opinion that in the Soviet period the Institute of Philosophy had been a mere citadel of ideological dogmatism, the author shows that even in the most oppressive periods of stagnation not only did the institute resist the imposition of this atmosphere, but it openly refused to take part in any campaign of condemnation or ideological reprisal against nonconformists, whether in philosophy, literature, economics, or politics. The reigning atmosphere in the institute at that time was one of (...) glasnost, open argument, and constructive discussion. And the mediator of such an environment was the institute's Communist Party chapter, which among other positive influences, provided the institute and its associates with real protection from Stalinism, hostility, and societal pressure. While in the country as a whole there had never been a civil society, the institute always possessed and actively displayed the key features of such an institution. The famous wall newspaper published at the institute was one sign of such its civic-social maturity. (shrink)

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo], along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo] , along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the problem of the overman becomes one of the most discussed problems in Russia. This was mainly a consequence of the boom in the popularity of Nietzsche's writings; however, to a significant degree it was conditioned also by Solov'ev's works. The religious pathos of Solov'ev's philosophy prepared Russian specialists in the humanities to take an attentive interest in and eventually to accept precisely the "overhuman" aspect of Nietzschean thought. It would not be wrong (...) to assert that the special nature of the Russian Nietzscheanism of the Silver Age consists precisely in the fact that the idea of the overman firmly occupied a central place in it. While the representatives of academic scholarship and religious writers in the final years of the nineteenth century recoiled in horror from the Nietzschean overman, seeing in him the mark of Satanic origin, the embodied idea of evil, indeed the Antichrist himself, the young generation of idealist philosophers, the activists of the Russian religious renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century, on the contrary, welcomed the Nietzschean image as a symbol of the approaching religious renewal of culture. The general mood of those years was accurately conveyed by D. Merezhkovskii: "The overman is the last point, the sharpest summit of the great mountain ridge of European philosophy, with its age-old roots in the rebellious, solitary, and aloof personality. One can go no further: precipice and abyss, fall or flight: the way of the overman-religion.". (shrink)

Two years ago, a professor at the University of California, Herbert Marcuse, an American social philosopher with traditional German training, came to be regarded as the recognized theoretician of the "New Left" movement. Marcuse's popularity compelled many writers, including ourselves , to make a careful examination specifically of the theoretical content of that teaching, which laid claim to performing the role of a critical and revolutionary theory of society. The development of a critique of the philosophical and theoretical foundations and (...) the internal contradictions of Marcuse's teachings was thus dictated by a real situation, by the actual struggle of ideas, and has perhaps still not lost its significance. Another problem, which aroused the interest of researchers even then but which had not found an answer in our article because of its specific purpose, had to do with the relationship between Marcuse's philosophical concept and the spontaneous consciousness of the "mass" participants in the real protest movement that came to be known as the "New Left" movement. (shrink)

In the years since World War II, the social critic has become a rather popular figure in the West. The demand for critical theories of society is readily explainable where the contradictions of social development take the form of sharp paradoxes recognized by the broad public. It may be assumed that interest in critical concepts of society will increase. People who recognize themselves as cogs without rights in the system of bureaucratic organization of state-supported monopoly capitalism, who react acutely to (...) the threat of social catastrophes , endow such concepts with the halo of humanism if only because they often find in them their own moods, given shape and seemingly elevated to the level of general social protest. These feelings represent a concrete dissatisfaction with the present situation, and the sense that the society in which they live is in crisis. (shrink)

During the half-century of its existence, the Soviet study of esthetics has achieved considerable success in developing the views of the founders of Marxism-Leninism with respect to the nature and social function of art. There is no need to list the authors and titles of the works in which the history of world thought about esthetics and the cardinal problems of esthetics have been treated from the Marxist standpoint. Suffice it to say that Soviet esthetic thought has been the first (...) to deal with such very important categories as the principle of partisanship in art, the creative method , the principles of socialist realism, the international and the national in art, and so forth. (shrink)

The deep commonality of science and art lies in the fact that both phenomena arose as a means of breaking out of the self-contained shell of the self-sufficient world of everyday consciousness. Science and art arose as a means of escaping from the narrow bounds of natural existence, so as to recognize one's specifically human attitude toward the world, recognize the value of truth, beauty, and the right. In the course of history, science and art have created highly specialized superstructures. (...) Science became a means for technological mastery of the world, and even its deep-lying substrate is perceived by us today primarily from the standpoint of the technological power it attains. In art the primary task of discovering harmony is by no means always identifiable, because it is aimed at creating consumer-oriented esthetic values. Science and art have sharply parted company in pursuit of their utilitarian functions, and this interferes with seeing their basic unity. There float to the surface such secondary phenomena as the fruitfulness of a scientist's efforts in one or another sphere of art, whether it be amateur creativity, deep involvement in esthetic values, or the study of art by the methods of science. When they interact thus, science and art appear in such polar roles that no commonality between them is observed at all. (shrink)

A new term, "the new conservatism," has recently appeared in the American sociopolitical lexicon. The meaning given it does not resolve merely to a description of the current conservative trends in the United States , which until recently were termed neoconservative in the critical literature. A number of American writers have begun to employ the term "new conservatism" in a narrower sense: to denote the evolution of the sociopolitical views of those ideologists of capitalist reformism who were, until recently, known (...) as neoliberals. The term "new conservatism" was first employed in that sense by the American radical sociologist Michael Harrington in analyzing the evolution, in the realm of political ideas and social policy, of the views of such prominent bourgeois ideologists as Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and others. To those listed, this identification appeared so well chosen and reflective of the essence of the matter that subsequently they themselves began to speak of themselves as new conservatives. This term has become firmly established in the American sociological literature. It is the purpose of the present article to examine the "legitimacy" of the use of this term and the points of contact between this group and the conservatives or neoconservatives and the lines of demarcation between them. (shrink)

There are words and concepts that almost automatically trigger bitter discussions in our country. And among them are the terms in the title of this article. True, there are occasional attempts to tone down the bitterness of the disputes surrounding them by using the more ideologically "neutral" terms "personal" or "individual." But the dispute is of course not about the words but about their meaning. Let us begin by looking in the dictionary.

Marx said that a science attains perfection when it is successful in employing mathematics.

The question of the nature and regularities of development of the socialist state is quite urgent at present, because identification and application of the objective laws of development of the socialist state will facilitate successful solution of practical problems of governmental, economic, and sociocultural construction and make possible a deep and comprehensive analysis of the course of evolution of statehood in the modern world. In the USSR these processes are proceeding under conditions in which a new Constitution, adopted two years (...) ago, is in force. (shrink)

I would like to tell you about my own road to the serious pursuit of philosophy, relying only on my own memory, although occasionally I shall check this against other testimony. These are merely the notes of a witness and participant in the events described.

The persistent struggle waged by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries for peaceful coexistence among states with differing social systems has greatly increased the authority of this humanitarian policy in the eyes of the peoples of the world. Belligerent appeals for an outright rejection of peaceful coexistence are heard less and less frequently, even among the ideologists of imperialism. They are compelled to adapt themselves to the situation and to camouflage themselves with the masks of the peacemaker. Bourgeois (...) professors of social science say they are for peace and peaceful coexistence. However, these concepts are sometimes given such a distorted interpretation that all real content evaporates. "Peaceful coexistence and the cold war," we read, for example, in the words of the British professor, Hugh Seton-Watson, "are literally the same thing." [All quotations from non-Russian sources are retranslated from the Russian.] Thus, a single sentence suffices, by an act of sophistry, to transform peaceful coexistence into a state of international tension and intensive war preparations. The ideologists of imperialism deny, in essence, the possibility of cooperation between the socialist and capitalist countries in the process of peaceful coexistence. (shrink)

Seven decades separate us from the time when the workers raised the scarlet banner of revolution on the barricades of the Krasnaia Presnia district. The December armed insurrection in Moscow was the high point of development of the first Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, which occurred in 1905-1907. Seventy years are enough to permit a comprehensive evaluation of the historic significance of the events of 1905, which exercised a lasting influence on the whole subsequent development of the world movement for liberation.

The documents of the Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU, the new Party Program, the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Congress, and the welcoming addresses of the foreign delegations revealed a broad and multi-colored panorama of contemporary world development in all its variety and contradictions.

The general notion of the development of productive forces is, according to the materialist understanding of history, the point of departure for the solution of numerous concrete problems in Marxist-Leninist social theory and current revolutionary practice. It offers decisive arguments for the critique of Right and "Left" revisionism and reformism. In the course of the disputes that have recently begun in the Marxist economic and philosophical literature with regard to the basic questions involved in this problem, substantial gaps are found (...) specifically in the development of general theory. What is the internal contradiction moving within the forces of production; in what lies the distinction between their existence and essence, essence and appearance? A correct understanding of the processes involved in the resolution of this contradiction in real life, in revolutionary practice, depends upon attaining the utmost clarity with regard to these questions. (shrink)

In the academic year just past, the Expert Commission on Philosophical Disciplines of the Higher Certification Committee [VAK] processed 441 cases pertaining to the award of degrees and ranks. Of these, positive decisions were handed down in 333 cases, and negative decisions in 9 cases, while final decisions have not yet been taken on 99. Of the total number, 418 cases were examined, 114 of these for the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences and 304 for Candidate in Philosophical Sciences, (...) and final decisions were taken on 323, while 95 were referred to further expert examination. (shrink)

As it happened, I became acquainted with E.V. Il'enkov quite late, in the mid- or even the late 1960s. It was only a bit more than ten years before his death that I began to feel at home in his house, was able to visit without calling ahead, and was able to call him by his first name and the familiar "you"—that is, like many, many of not only his true friends but also like-minded thinkers, who became his close acquaintances, (...) most of whom justly considered themselves his pupils … The door would open wide, and Olia, Professor K.I. Salimova, Eval'd's wife and most devoted friend, not at all surprised by the unexpected guest and seemingly even quite happy at his arrival , would try first to draw him into the kitchen and feed him … which she more often than not succeeded in doing. I am not talking about myself: there were always many guests, and this is precisely how they arrived at the Il'enkovs' apartment. Recently, a critic in Literaturnaia gazeta recalled those whom he met in Eval'd's apartment in the 1960s: "This was a tight circle of like-minded thinkers," wrote the critic. "But some of them are no longer with us, while most are far away, beyond our borders." Obviously, he had not been in the house often or had forgotten things over the distance of years. There was no "circle," nor could there have been one—not with this host, not with his lifestyle and way of relating to people. I met a good hundred fine and various people in Eval'd's home: I.N. Korzhavin, V. Davydov, A. Meshcheriakov, S. Vinogradova, N. Dubinin, V. Zinchenko, A. Zinov'ev, Iu. Kamiakin, and … indeed, five pages would not be enough to list the quite famous and the not-quite-so-famous, simply ordinary people with no claim to fame. Nazym Khikmet, A.N. Leont'ev, and B.M. Kedrov were friends of the house … Ever new faces, figures, and words come to mind. I cannot forgive myself: once Eval'd Vasil'evich wanted to take me along to Iurii Liubimov's to read his play Neither God nor Tsar nor Hero … [Ni bog, ni tsar' i ni geroi], but I had some other business, something so important that I do not even remember now what it was, and it is probably not worth remembering. But most likely I was too timid to appear uninvited at the house of a person burning with creativity. The same thing happened with Galich … Eval'd liked especially his song about Zoshchenko. He did not sing it; he narrated it, but in such a way that tears always came to one's eyes. (shrink)

Virtually the chief complaint thrown at Marxism by contemporary bourgeois philosophers is the accusation of undervaluation of "existential subject matter".

The author analyzes Mamardashvili's philosophical views by putting them in the context of contemporary Western philosophy, especially existentialism. He identifies unique features of Mamardashvili's philosophizing that he equates with existentially interpreted soteriology.

The so-called ‘redintegration experiment’ is traditionally at the center of the comments on the supposed Boyle/Spinoza controversy. A. Clericuzio influentially argued in his publications that, in De nitro, Boyle accounted for the ‘redintegration’ of saltpeter on the grounds of the chemical properties of corpuscles and “did not make any attempt to deduce them from mechanical principles”. By way of contrast, this paper argues that with his De nitro Boyle wanted to illustrate and promote his new corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, and (...) that he made significant attempts to explain the phenomena in terms of mechanical qualities. Boyle had borrowed the ‘redintegration experiment’ from R. Glauber and used it in an attempt to demonstrate that his philosophy was superior to the Peripatetic and Paracelsian theory. Consequently, Clericuzio’s characterization of the Boyle/Spinoza controversy as a discussion between a strict mechanical philosopher and a chemist is problematic and a wider view of Spinoza’s interpretation and its context gives a fairer picture. (shrink)

The so-called ‘redintegration experiment’ is traditionally at the center of the comments on the supposed Boyle/Spinoza controversy. A. Clericuzio influentially argued in his publications that, in De nitro, Boyle accounted for the ‘redintegration’ of saltpeter on the grounds of the chemical properties of corpuscles and “did not make any attempt to deduce them from mechanical principles”. By way of contrast, this paper argues that with his De nitro Boyle wanted to illustrate and promote his new corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, and (...) that he made significant attempts to explain the phenomena in terms of mechanical qualities. Boyle had borrowed the ‘redintegration experiment’ from R. Glauber and used it in an attempt to demonstrate that his philosophy was superior to the Peripatetic and Paracelsian theory. Consequently, Clericuzio’s characterization of the Boyle/Spinoza controversy as a discussion between a strict mechanical philosopher and a chemist is problematic and a wider view of Spinoza’s interpretation and its context gives a fairer picture. (shrink)

A hundred years have passed since publication of the first edition of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which Lenin regarded as "one of the basic works of modern socialism." Engels's interest in the remote past of mankind and Lenin's evaluation of his work were, of course, not coincidental. They may be explained by the tremendous role played by the concept of primitive history in a general materialist understanding of the universal historical process. What (...) was the nature of this very first term in the sequence of socioeconomic formations, this cornerstone of the Marxist concept of universal history? When did private property, antagonistic social classes, and state power, separate from the people, emerge, and what were they, original and permanent institutions, or historically determined institutions of human communal life? These problems are clearly of great philosophical importance. They were, and continue to be, the arena of a bitter ideological struggle, and inevitably attracted the most conscientious attention of the founders of scientific communism. (shrink)

The triumph of the socialist revolution in Russia, the fiftieth anniversary of which the Soviet people are marking this year, the building of socialism in the USSR, and the coming into being of a world socialist system eliminated the ideological monopoly theretofore enjoyed by exploitative society in the contemporary world. For the first time in human history, an ideology of the toiling masses has extensively taken root in a number of countries. This has meant a narrowing of the sphere in (...) which bourgeois ideology is dominant, and could not fail to have a bearing upon all the forms of social consciousness in the capitalist world, including philosophy. (shrink)