Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy
Author: David Bakhurst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1991-06-28
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780521407106
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA critical study of the philosophical culture of the USSR.
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From Darkness to Light
Author: Igal Halfin
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Published: 2000-07-15
Total Pages: 490
ISBN-13: 0822972042
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this interdisciplinary and controversial work, Igal Halfin looks at Marxist theory in a new light, attempting to break down the divisions between history, philosophy, and literary theory. His approach is methodological, combining intellectual and social history to argue that if we are to take the Bolshevik revolutionary experiment seriously, we have to examine carefully the ideological presupposition of both communist ideological texts and the archival documents that social historians believe truly reflect lived experience in order to see what effects these texts had on reality. Igal Halfin aims to turn Marxism, class, and consciousness from subjects of analysis to its objects. From Darkness to Light begins by examining the Marxist philosophy of history as understood by the Russian revolutionary movement. Halfin argues that the Soviet government took its cues to how it could bring about a classless society from a peculiar blending of eschatological thinking and modern techniques of power. Halfin then offers a case study of the Bolshevik attempt in the 1920s to create the “Communist New Man” by amalgamating the characteristics of the intellectual and the worker in order to eradicate the petit-bourgeois traits attributed by the regime to the pre-revolutionary individualistic and decadent student. Halfin’s conclusions raise important questions about Marxist theory as it relates to class, historical progress, and communism itself. His approach suggests that “proletarianization” should be understood not as a change in the social composition of the student body, but as the introduction of the language of class into the universities. Through the examination of the process of the literary construction of class identity, Halfin concludes that the student class affiliation in the Soviet Union of the 1920s was not simply a matter of social origins, but of students’ ability, using a set of ritualized procedures, to defend their claims to a working-class identity. Halfin’s conclusions raise important questions about Marxist theory as it relates to class, historical progress, and communism itself.
Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov
Author: James White
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-11-05
Total Pages: 507
ISBN-13: 900426891X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this first full-length biography of Alexander Bogdanov, James D. White traces the intellectual development of this key socialist thinker, situating his ideas in the context of the Russian revolutionary movement. He examines the part Bogdanov played in the origins of Bolshevism, his role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and his conflict with Lenin, which lasted into Soviet times. The book examines in some detail Bogdanov’s intellectual legacy, which, though deliberately obscured and distorted by his adversaries, was considerable and is of lasting significance. Bogdanov was an original and influential interpreter of Marx. He had a mastery of many spheres of knowledge, this expertise being employed in writing his chief theoretical work Tectology, which anticipates modern systems theory. See inside the book.
The Formation of Reason
Author: David Bakhurst
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-03-21
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1444395599
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Formation of Reason, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind. Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky Discusses foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice
New Myth, New World
Author: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2010-11-01
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13: 9780271046587
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.
The Foundation Pit
Author: Andrei Platonov
Publisher: ISCI
Published: 2022-03-01
Total Pages: 123
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
The Ideal in Human Activity
Author: Ėvalʹd Vasilʹevich Ilʹenkov
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 391
ISBN-13: 9780980542875
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was a renowned Soviet philosopher who did important original work on the materialist development of Hegel's dialectics. Ilʹenkov developed a distinct solution to what he called 'the problem of the ideal'; that is, the problem of the place of the non-material in social life and the natural world. This involves a resolute defence of the objectivity of ideal phenomena, which are said to exist as aspects of our spiritual culture, embodied in our environment. There are important continuities between Ilyenkov's ideas and controversies in Soviet philosophy and psychology in the 1920s and '30s, particularly with Vygotsky's socio-historical psychology. The work of Vygotsky and Leont'ev can hardly be understood without a study of Ilyenkov. Ilyenkov died in 1979, by his own hand. This edition includes a short preface by Mike Cole, two of the three books by Ilyenkov which have been translated and published in English, and several essays on the key topics of activity and the ideal."--Back cover.
Practicing the Good
Author: Keti Chukrov
Publisher: EFLUX ARCHITECTURE
Published: 2020-04-28
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781517909550
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA philosophical consideration of Soviet Socialism that reveals the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporary anticapitalist discourse and theory This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism's domination is resisted--the zones of countercapitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress--and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition. By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anticapitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies' views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.
History and Class Consciousness
Author: Georg Lukacs
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1972-11-15
Total Pages: 412
ISBN-13: 9780262620208
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat. Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows: "For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."
Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx
Author: Professor Emeritus Jonathan I Israel
Publisher:
Published: 2021-06-06
Total Pages: 544
ISBN-13: 9780295748665
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world's most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx's writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward--but hardly as they intended.
