Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Contemporary philosophy
Despite the tradition of philosophical professionalism established
during the Enlightenment by Wolff and Kant, philosophy in the 19th
century was still created largely outside the universities. Comte,
Mill,
Marx, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer were not professors, and only the
German idealist school was rooted in academic life. Since the mid-20th
century, however, most well-known philosophers have been associated with
academia. Philosophers more and more employ a technical vocabulary and
deal with specialized problems, and they write not for a broad
intellectual public but for one another. Professionalism also has
sharpened the divisions between philosophical schools and made the
question of what philosophy is and what it ought to be a matter of the
sharpest controversy. Philosophy has become extremely self-conscious
about its own method and nature.
The most significant divisions in 20th-century philosophy were
influenced and intensified by geographic and cultural differences. The
tradition of clear logical analysis, inaugurated by Locke and Hume,
dominated the English-speaking world, whereas a speculative and broadly
historical tradition, begun by Hegel but later diverging radically from
him, held sway on the European continent. From the early decades of the
century, the substantive as well as stylistic differences between the
two approaches—known after World War II as analytic and Continental
philosophy, respectively—gradually became more pronounced, and until the
1990s few serious attempts were made to find common ground between them.
Other less-significant currents in 20th-century philosophy were the
speculative philosophies of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) of France,
John
Dewey (1859–1952) of the United States, and Alfred North Whitehead
(1861–1947) of England—each of whom evades easy classification—and the
philosophical Marxism practiced in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe
until the collapse of communism there in 1990–91.
Contemporary philosophy » Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead
In his An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and in his masterpiece,
Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson distinguished between two profoundly
different ways of knowing: the method of analysis, which is
characteristic of science, and the method of intuition, a kind of
intellectual sympathy through which it is possible to enter into objects
and other persons and identify with them. All basic metaphysical truths,
Bergson held, are grasped by philosophical intuition. This is how one
comes to know one’s deepest self and the essence of all living things,
which he called “duration,” as well as the “vital spirit,” which is the
mysterious creative agency in the world.
For Whitehead, philosophy is primarily metaphysics, or “speculative
philosophy,” which he described as the effort “to frame a coherent,
logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every
element of our experience can be interpreted.” Whitehead’s philosophy
was thus an attempt to survey the world with a large generality of
understanding, an end toward which his great trilogy, Science and the
Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas
(1933), was directed.
Whereas Bergson and Whitehead were principally metaphysicians and
philosophers of culture, Dewey was a generalist who stressed the unity,
interrelationship, and organicity of all forms of philosophical
knowledge. He is chiefly notable for the fact that his conception of
philosophy stressed so powerfully the notions of practicality and moral
purpose. One of the guiding aims of Dewey’s philosophizing was the
effort to find the same warranted assertibility for ethical and
political judgements as for scientific ones. Philosophy, he said, should
be oriented not to professional pride but to human need.
Dewey’s approach to the social problems of the 20th century, unlike
that of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), emphasized not revolution but the
continuous application of the intellect to social affairs. He believed
in social planning—in conscious, intelligent intervention to produce
desirable social change—and he proposed a new “experimentalism” as a
guide to enlightened public action to promote the aims of a democratic
community. His pragmatic social theory is the first major political
philosophy produced by modern liberal democracy.
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Henri Bergson
French philosopher
in full Henri-Louis Bergson
born Oct. 18, 1859, Paris, France
died Jan. 4, 1941, Paris
Main
French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be
called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in
favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was
also a master literary stylist, of both academic and popular
appeal, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1927.
Early years
Through his father, a talented musician, Bergson was
descended from a rich Polish Jewish family—the sons of
Berek, or Berek-son, from which the name Bergson is derived.
His mother came from an English Jewish family. Bergson’s
upbringing, training, and interests were typically French,
and his professional career, as indeed all of his life, was
spent in France, most of it in Paris.
He received his early education at the Lycée Condorcet in
Paris, where he showed equally great gifts in the sciences
and the humanities. From 1878 to 1881 he studied at the
École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the institution
responsible for training university teachers. The general
culture that he received there made him equally at home in
reading the Greek and Latin classics, in obtaining what he
wanted and needed from the science of his day, and in
acquiring a beginning in the career of philosophy, to which
he turned upon graduation.
His teaching career began in various lycées outside of
Paris, first at Angers (1881–83) and then for the next five
years at Clermont-Ferrand. While at the latter place, he had
the intuition that provided both the basis and inspiration
for his first philosophical books. As he later wrote to the
eminent American Pragmatist William James:
I had remained up to that time wholly imbued with
mechanistic theories, to which I had been led at an early
date by the reading of Herbert Spencer. . . . It was the
analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into
mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw,
to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not
endure. . . that positive science consists essentially in
the elimination of duration. This was the point of departure
of a series of reflections which brought me, by gradual
steps, to reject almost all of what I had hitherto accepted
and to change my point of view completely.
The first result of this change was his Essai sur les
données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness), for
which he received the doctorate the same year. This work was
primarily an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or
lived time, as opposed to what Bergson viewed as the
spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is
employed by science. He proceeded by analyzing the awareness
that man has of his inner self to show that psychological
facts are qualitatively different from any other, charging
psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by
trying to quantify and number them. Fechner’s Law, claiming
to establish a calculable relation between the intensity of
the stimulus and that of the corresponding sensation, was
especially criticized. Once the confusions were cleared away
that confounded duration with extension, succession with
simultaneity, and quality with quantity, he maintained that
the objections to human liberty made in the name of
scientific determinism could be seen to be baseless.
Philosophical triumphs
The publication of the Essai found Bergson returned to
Paris, teaching at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1891 he married
Louise Neuburger, a cousin of the French novelist Marcel
Proust. Meanwhile, he had undertaken the study of the
relation between mind and body. The prevailing doctrine was
that of the so-called psychophysiological parallelism, which
held that for every psychological fact there is a
corresponding physiological fact that strictly determines
it. Though he was convinced that he had refuted the argument
for determinism, his own work, in the doctoral dissertation,
had not attempted to explain how mind and body are related.
The findings of his research into this problem were
published in 1896 under the title Matière et mémoire: essai
sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Matter and Memory).
This is the most difficult and perhaps also the most
perfect of his books. The approach that he took in it is
typical of his method of doing philosophy. He did not
proceed by general speculation and was not concerned with
elaborating a great speculative system. He began in this, as
in each of his books, with a particular problem, which he
analyzed by first determining the empirical (observed) facts
that are known about it according to the best and most
up-to-date scientific opinion. Thus, for Matière et mémoire
he devoted five years to studying all of the literature
available on memory and especially the psychological
phenomenon of aphasia, or loss of the ability to use
language. According to the theory of psychophysiological
parallelism, a lesion in the brain should also affect the
very basis of a psychological power. The occurrence of
aphasia, Bergson argued, showed that this is not the case.
The person so affected understands what others have to say,
knows what he himself wants to say, suffers no paralysis of
the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This fact
shows, he argued, that it is not memory that is lost but,
rather, the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it.
From this observation Bergson concluded that memory, and so
mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to
carry out its own purposes.
The Essai had been widely reviewed in the professional
journals, but Matière et mémoire attracted the attention of
a wider audience and marked the first step along the way
that led to Bergson’s becoming one of the most popular and
influential lecturers and writers of the day. In 1897 he
returned as professor of philosophy to the École Normale
Supérieure, which he had first entered as a student at the
age of 19. Then, in 1900, he was called to the Collège de
France, the academic institution of highest prestige in all
of France, where he enjoyed immense success as a lecturer.
From then until the outbreak of World War I, there was a
veritable vogue of Bergsonism. William James was an
enthusiastic reader of his works, and the two men became
warm friends. Expositions and commentaries on the Bergsonian
philosophy were to be found everywhere. It was held by many
that a new day in philosophy had dawned that brought with it
light to many other activities such as literature, music,
painting, politics, and religion.
L’Évolution créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution), the
greatest work of these years and Bergson’s most famous book,
reveals him most clearly as a philosopher of process at the
same time that it shows the influence of biology upon his
thought. In examining the idea of life, Bergson accepted
evolution as a scientifically established fact. He
criticized, however, the philosophical interpretations that
had been given of it for failing to see the importance of
duration and hence missing the very uniqueness of life. He
proposed that the whole evolutionary process should be seen
as the endurance of an élan vital (“vital impulse”) that is
continually developing and generating new forms. Evolution,
in short, is creative, not mechanistic. (See creative
evolution.)
In this developing process, he traced two main lines: one
through instinct, leading to the life of insects; the other
through the evolution of intelligence, resulting in man;
both of which, however, are seen as the work of one vital
impulse that is at work everywhere in the world. The final
chapter of the book, entitled “The Cinematographical
Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion,” presents
a review of the whole history of philosophical thought with
the aim of showing that it everywhere failed to appreciate
the nature and importance of becoming, falsifying thereby
the nature of reality by the imposition of static and
discrete concepts.
Among Bergson’s minor works are Le Rire: essai sur la
significance du comique (1900; Laughter: An Essay on the
Meaning of the Comic) and, Introduction à la metaphysique
(1903; An Introduction to Metaphysics). The latter provides
perhaps the best introduction to his philosophy by offering
the clearest account of his method. There are two profoundly
different ways of knowing, he claimed. The one, which
reaches its furthest development in science, is analytic,
spatializing, and conceptualizing, tending to see things as
solid and discontinuous. The other is an intuition that is
global, immediate, reaching into the heart of a thing by
sympathy. The first is useful for getting things done, for
acting on the world, but it fails to reach the essential
reality of things precisely because it leaves out duration
and its perpetual flux, which is inexpressible and to be
grasped only by intuition. Bergson’s entire work may be
considered as an extended exploration of the meaning and
implications of his intuition of duration as constituting
the innermost reality of everything.
Later years
In 1914 Bergson retired from all active duties at the
Collège de France, although he did not formally retire from
the chair until 1921. Having received the highest honours
that France could offer him, including membership, since
1915, among the “40 immortals” of the Académie Française, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
After L’Évolution créatrice, 25 years elapsed before he
published another major work. In 1932 he published Les Deux
Sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion). As in the earlier works, he claimed
that the polar opposition of the static and the dynamic
provides the basic insight. Thus, in the moral, social, and
religious life of men he saw, on the one side, the work of
the closed society, expressed in conformity to codified laws
and customs, and, on the other side, the open society, best
represented by the dynamic aspirations of heroes and
mystical saints reaching out beyond and even breaking the
strictures of the groups in which they live. There are,
thus, two moralities, or, rather, two sources: the one
having its roots in intelligence, which leads also to
science and its static, mechanistic ideal; the other based
on intuition, and finding its expression not only in the
free creativity of art and philosophy but also in the
mystical experience of the saints.
Bergson in Les Deux Sources had come much closer to the
orthodox religious notion of God than he had in the vital
impulse of L’Évolution créatrice. He acknowledged in his
will of 1937, “My reflections have led me closer and closer
to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of
Judaism.” Yet, although declaring his “moral adherence to
Catholicism,” he never went beyond that. In explanation, he
wrote: “I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen
for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break
upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow
were to be persecuted.” To confirm this conviction, only a
few weeks before his death, he arose from his sickbed and
stood in line in order to register as a Jew, in accord with
the law just imposed by the Vichy government and from which
he refused the exemption that had been offered him.
Influence
Although it did not give rise to a Bergsonian school of
philosophy, Bergson’s influence has been considerable. His
influence among philosophers has been greatest in France,
but it has also been felt in the United States and Great
Britain, especially in the work of William James; George
Santayana; and Alfred North Whitehead, the other great
process metaphysician of the 20th century.
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John Dewey
American philosopher and educator
born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.
died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y.
Main
American philosopher and educator who was one of the
founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, a
pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the
progressive movement in education in the United States.
Early life
The son of a grocer in Vermont, Dewey attended the public
schools of Burlington and there entered the University of
Vermont. After graduating from the university in 1879, Dewey
taught high school for three years. In the fall of 1882 he
entered Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, for advanced
study in philosophy. There he came under the influence of
George Sylvester Morris, who was a leading exponent of
Neo-Hegelianism, a revival of the thought of the
early-19th-century German philosopher Hegel. Dewey found in
this philosophy, with its emphasis on the spiritual and
organic nature of the universe, what he had been vaguely
groping for, and he eagerly embraced it.
After being awarded the Ph.D. degree by Johns Hopkins
University in 1884, Dewey, in the fall of that year, went to
the University of Michigan, where, at the urging of Morris,
he had been appointed an instructor in philosophy and
psychology. With the exception of the academic year 1888–89,
when he served as professor of philosophy at the University
of Minnesota, Dewey spent the next 10 years at Michigan.
During this time his philosophical endeavours were devoted
mainly to an intensive study of Hegel and the British
Neo-Hegelians and to the new experimental physiological
psychology then being advanced in the United States by G.
Stanley Hall and William James.
Dewey’s interest in education began during his years at
Michigan. His readings and observations revealed that most
schools were proceeding along lines set by early traditions
and were failing to adjust to the latest findings of child
psychology and to the needs of a changing democratic social
order. The search for a philosophy of education that would
remedy these defects became a major concern for Dewey and
added a new dimension to his thinking.
Philosophical thought
Dewey left Michigan in 1894 to become professor of
philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy,
psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.
Dewey’s achievements there brought him national fame. The
increasing dominance of evolutionary biology and psychology
in his thinking led him to abandon the Hegelian theory of
ideas, which views them as somehow mirroring the rational
order of the universe, and to accept instead an
instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceives of
ideas as tools or instruments in the solution of problems
encountered in the environment. These same disciplines
contributed somewhat later to his rejection of the Hegelian
notion of an Absolute Mind manifesting itself as a
rationally structured, material universe and as realizing
its goals through a dialectic of ideas. Dewey found more
acceptable a theory of reality holding that nature, as
encountered in scientific and ordinary experience, is the
ultimate reality and that man is a product of nature who
finds his meaning and goals in life here and now.
Since these doctrines, which were to remain at the centre
of all of Dewey’s future philosophizing, also furnished the
framework in which Dewey’s colleagues in the department
carried on their research, a distinct school of philosophy
was in operation. This was recognized by William James in
1903, when a collection of essays written by Dewey and seven
of his associates in the department, Studies in Logical
Theory, appeared. James hailed the book enthusiastically and
declared that with its publication a new school of
philosophy, the Chicago school, had made its appearance.
Dewey’s philosophical orientation has been labeled a form
of pragmatism, though Dewey himself seemed to favour the
term “instrumentalism,” or “experimentalism.” William
James’s The Principles of Psychology early stimulated
Dewey’s rethinking of logic and ethics by directing his
attention to the practical function of ideas and concepts,
but Dewey and the Chicago school of pragmatists went farther
than James had gone in that they conceived of ideas as
instruments for transforming the uneasiness connected with
the experience of having a problem into the satisfaction of
some resolution or clarification of it.
Dewey’s preferred mode of inquiry was scientific
investigation; he thought the experimental methods of modern
science provided the most promising approach to social and
ethical as well as scientific problems. He rejected the idea
of a fixed and immutable moral law derivable from
consideration of the essential nature of man, since such a
traditional philosophical method denied the potential
application and promise of newer empirical and scientific
methods.
Dewey developed from these views a philosophical ground
for democracy and liberalism. He conceived of democracy not
as a mere form of government, but rather as a mode of
association which provides the members of a society with the
opportunity for maximum experimentation and personal growth.
The ideal society, for Dewey, was one that provided the
conditions for ever enlarging the experience of all its
members.
Dewey’s contributions to psychology were also noteworthy.
Many of the articles he wrote at that time are now accepted
as classics in psychological literature and assure him a
secure place in the history of psychology. Most significant
is the essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which
is generally taken to mark the beginnings of functional
psychology—i.e., one that focuses on the total organism in
its endeavours to adjust to the environment.
Educational theory and practice. Dewey’s work in
philosophy and psychology was largely centred in his major
interest, educational reform. In formulating educational
criteria and aims, he drew heavily on the insights into
learning offered by contemporary psychology as applied to
children. He viewed thought and learning as a process of
inquiry starting from doubt or uncertainty and spurred by
the desire to resolve practical frictions or relieve strain
and tension. Education must therefore begin with experience,
which has as its aim growth and the achievement of maturity.
Dewey’s writings on education, notably his The School and
Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902),
presented and defended what were to remain the chief
underlying tenets of the philosophy of education he
originated. These tenets were that the educational process
must begin with and build upon the interests of the child;
that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of
thinking and doing in the child’s classroom experience; that
the teacher should be a guide and coworker with the pupils,
rather than a taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons
and recitations; and that the school’s goal is the growth of
the child in all aspects of its being.
Among the results of Dewey’s administrative efforts were
the establishment of an independent department of pedagogy
and of the University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, in
which the educational theories and practices suggested by
psychology and philosophy could be tested. The Laboratory
Schools, the original unit of which began operation in 1896,
attracted wide attention and enhanced the reputation of the
University of Chicago as a foremost centre of progressive
educational thought. Dewey headed the Laboratory Schools
from 1903 to 1904.
Dewey’s ideas and proposals strongly affected educational
theory and practice in the United States. Aspects of his
views were seized upon by the “progressive movement” in
education, which stressed the student-centred rather than
the subject-centred school, education through activity
rather than through formal learning, and laboratory,
workshop, or occupational education rather than the mastery
of traditional subjects. But though Dewey’s own faith in
progressive education never wavered, he came to realize that
the zeal of his followers introduced a number of excesses
and defects into progressive education. Indeed, in
Experience and Education (1938) he sharply criticized
educators who sought merely to interest or amuse students,
disregarded organized subject matter in favour of mere
activity on the part of students, and were content with mere
vocational training.
During the last two decades of Dewey’s life, his
philosophy of education was the target of numerous and
widespread attacks. Progressive educational practices were
blamed for the failure of some American school systems to
train pupils adequately in the liberal arts and for their
neglect of such basic subjects as mathematics and science.
Furthermore, critics blamed Dewey and his progressive ideas
for what the former viewed as an insufficient emphasis on
discipline in the schools.
Career at Columbia University
Disagreements between President William Rainey Harper of the
University of Chicago and Dewey led, in 1904, to Dewey’s
resignation of his posts and to his acceptance of a
professorship of philosophy at Columbia University in New
York City. Dewey was associated with Columbia for 47 years,
first as professor and then as professor emeritus of
philosophy. During his 25 years of active teaching, his fame
and the significance of what he had to say attracted
thousands of students from home and abroad to his classes,
and he became one of the most widely known and influential
teachers in America. Dewey’s influence extended even further
after he taught and lectured in countries such as Japan
(1919), China (1919–21), Turkey (1924), Mexico (1926), and
the Soviet Union (1928).
Dewey’s scholarly output at Columbia was enormous; one
bibliography devotes approximately 125 pages to listing the
titles of his publications during these years. His thought
covered a wide range of topics, including logic and theory
of knowledge, psychology, education, social philosophy, fine
arts, and religion. Major works dealing with each of these
fields appeared over the years and clearly established Dewey
as the foremost philosopher in America and as one of the
nation’s most productive scholars. His Experience and
Nature, published in 1925, brings together in a systematic
way the more important aspects of his philosophy and is
generally regarded as his magnum opus.
His interest in current affairs prompted Dewey to
contribute regularly to liberal periodicals, especially The
New Republic. His articles focused on domestic, foreign, and
international developments and were designed to reach a wide
reading public. Because of his skill in analyzing and
interpreting events, he soon was rated as among the best of
American commentators and social critics.
Dewey also gave his time and energy to the support of
organizations and causes in which he believed. In 1895 he
was a founding member of the National Herbart Society
(renamed the National Society for the Study of Education in
1902), and he served two terms as chairman (1903–05) of the
National Society of College Teachers of Education, which he
had helped establish in 1902. Dewey became one of the
founders and the first president of the American Association
of University Professors in 1915, and the next year he
became a charter member of the first teachers’ union in New
York City. He helped found the New School for Social
Research in 1919 and the University-in-Exile in 1933,
established for scholars being persecuted in countries under
totalitarian regimes. In 1937, at age 78, he headed a
commission of inquiry that went to Mexico City to hear Leon
Trotsky’s rebuttal of the charges made against him in the
Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937.
Dewey retired from the Columbia faculty in 1930, after
which he concentrated on public affairs while continuing to
write. Among his books on psychology and philosophy are
Psychology (1887), Ethics (cowritten with James Tufts;
1908), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and
Conduct (1922), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as
Experience (1934), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), and
Freedom and Culture (1939). His chief later writings on
education are Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience
and Education (1938).
George Dykhuizen
Clarence Henry Faust
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Alfred North Whitehead
British mathematician and philosopher
born Feb. 15, 1861, Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, Eng.
died Dec. 30, 1947, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
Main
English mathematician and philosopher, who collaborated with
Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and,
from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and
developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory.
Background and schooling.
Whitehead’s grandfather Thomas Whitehead was a self-made man
who started a successful boys’ school known as Chatham House
Academy. His father, Alfred Whitehead, an Anglican
clergyman, in turn headed the school and later became vicar
of St. Peter’s in Thanet. His mother, born Maria Sarah
Buckmaster, was the daughter of a prosperous military
tailor. Alfred North Whitehead was their youngest child.
Because they considered him too frail for school or active
sports, his father taught him at home until he was 14, when
he was sent to Sherborne School, Dorset, which was then one
of the best schools in England. Whitehead received a
classical education, showing a special gift for mathematics.
Despite his over-protected childhood, he showed himself a
natural leader. In his last year at school, he was head
prefect, responsible for all discipline outside the
classroom, and was a highly successful captain of games.
In 1880 Whitehead entered Trinity College, Cambridge, on
a scholarship. He attended only mathematical lectures, and
his interests in literature, religion, philosophy, and
politics were nourished solely by conversation. It was not
until May 1884, however, that he was elected to an elite
discussion society known as the “Apostles.” Whitehead did
well in the Mathematical Tripos (honours examination) of
1883–84, won a Trinity fellowship, and was appointed to the
mathematical staff of the college. His interest in James
Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electricity and magnetism (the
subject of his fellowship dissertation) expanded toward a
scrutiny of mathematical symbolism and ideas. Stimulated by
pioneering works in modern algebra, he envisaged a detailed
comparative study of systems of symbolic reasoning allied to
ordinary algebra. He did not begin to write his Treatise on
Universal Algebra (1898), however, until January 1891, one
month after his marriage to Evelyn Willoughby Wade. She had
been born in France, a child of impoverished Irish landed
gentry, and educated in a convent. She was a woman with a
great sense of drama and a real and unusual aesthetic
sensibility, and she enriched Whitehead’s life immensely.
Shortly before his marriage, his long-standing interest
in religion had taken a new turn. His background had been
solidly tied into the Church of England; his father and
uncles had been ordained; so had his brother Henry, who
would become bishop of Madras. But Whitehead, under the
influence of Cardinal Newman, began to consider the tenets
of the Roman Catholic Church. For about eight years he read
a great deal of theology. Then he sold his theological
library and gave up religion. This agnosticism did not
survive World War I, but Whitehead was never again a member
of any church.
Whitehead was at work on a second volume of his Universal
Algebra from 1898 to 1903, when he abandoned it because he
was busy on a related, large investigation with Bertrand
Russell. He had spotted young Russell’s brilliance when he
examined him for entrance scholarships at Trinity College.
In 1890 Russell was a freshman studying mathematics there,
and Whitehead was one of his teachers. Gradually the two men
became close friends. In July 1900 they went to the First
International Congress of Philosophy in Paris, where they
were impressed by the precision with which the mathematician
Giuseppe Peano used symbolic logic to clarify the
foundations of arithmetic. Russell at once mastered Peano’s
notation and extended his methods. By the end of 1900 he had
written the first draft of his brilliant Principles of
Mathematics (1903). Whitehead agreed with its main
thesis—that all pure mathematics follows from a reformed
formal logic so that, of the two, logic is the fundamental
discipline. By 1901 Russell had secured his collaboration on
volume 2 of the Principles, in which this thesis was to be
established by strict symbolic reasoning. The task turned
out to be enormous. Their work had to be made independent of
Russell’s book; they called it Principia Mathematica. The
project occupied them until 1910, when the first of its
three volumes was published. The “official” text was written
in a notation, most of which was either taken from Peano or
invented by Whitehead. Broadly speaking, Whitehead left the
philosophical problems—notably the devising of a theory of
logical types—to Russell; and Russell, who had no teaching
duties, actually wrote out most of the book. But the
collaboration was thorough, and Russell gave Whitehead an
equal share of the credit. Whitehead’s only large published
piece employing the symbolism of the Principia is a masterly
speculative memoir, “On Mathematical Concepts of the
Material World” (1905).
Career in London.
In 1903 Trinity College had given Whitehead a 10-year
appointment as a senior lecturer, made him the head of the
mathematics staff, and permitted his teaching career to run
beyond the maximum of 25 years set by the college statutes.
Yet Whitehead’s future was uncertain: he had not made the
sort of discoveries that cause a man to be counted an
outstanding mathematician. (His interest was always
philosophical, in that it was directed more toward grasping
the nature of mathematics in its widest aspects and
organizing its ideas than toward discovering new theorems.)
There was, thus, little prospect of a Cambridge
professorship in mathematics for him at the expiration of
his Trinity lectureship. He did not wait for it to expire
but moved to London in 1910, even though he had no position
waiting for him there. His years of service at Trinity,
however, had made him a fellow for life, entitled to twice
the regular quarterly dividend paid to fellows. This was
scarcely enough to support his family, but Evelyn Whitehead
encouraged the venture.
In that first London year, Whitehead wrote the first of
his books for a wide audience, An Introduction to
Mathematics (1911), still one of the best books of its kind.
In 1911 he was appointed to the staff of University College
(London), and in 1914 he became professor of applied
mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and
Technology.
In London Whitehead observed the education then being
offered to the English masses. His own teaching had always
elicited his pupils’ latent abilities to the fullest.
Perceiving that mathematics was being taught as a
disconnected set of largely unfathomed exercises, Whitehead
made occasional addresses on the teaching of mathematics. He
stressed getting a living understanding of a few
interrelated abstract ideas by using them in a variety of
ways so as to develop an intimate sense for their power.
Whitehead also perceived that literature was so taught as to
preclude its enjoyment, that curricula were fragmented, and
that teachers were handcuffed by the system of uniform
examinations set by outside examiners. In 1916, as president
of the Mathematical Association, he delivered the notable
address “The Aims of Education: A Plea for Reform.”
Whitehead reminded youth’s keepers that the purpose of
education was not to pack knowledge into the pupils but to
stimulate and guide their self-development. “Culture,” he
said, “is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty
and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do
with it.” Whitehead’s address became a classic in virtue of
its unequalled clarity, vigour, and realism and its
reconciliation of general with special education. It was
followed by penetrating essays on such topics as the rhythm
of freedom and discipline. Though Whitehead’s essays on
education had little effect on British practice, they
inspired many teachers in Great Britain, the United States,
and elsewhere.
From 1919 to 1924 Whitehead was chairman of the governing
body of Goldsmiths’ College, London, one of England’s major
institutes for training teachers. He also served as a
governor of several polytechnic schools in London. In the
University of London he became a member of the Senate,
chairman of the Academic Council, and dean of the Faculty of
Science. His shrewdness, common sense, and goodwill put him
in great demand as a committeeman.
Whitehead was a pacific man but not a pacifist; he felt
that the war was hideous but that England’s part in it was
necessary. His elder son, North, fought throughout the war,
and his daughter, Jessie, worked in the Foreign Office. In
1918 his younger son, Eric, was killed in action, and after
that it was only by immense effort that Whitehead could go
on working. To Whitehead, Russell’s pacifism was simplistic;
yet he visited him in prison, remained his friend, and, as
Russell later said, showed him greater tolerance than he
could return.
During those years, Whitehead was also constructing
philosophical foundations for physics. He was led to this by
the way in which he wanted to present geometry—not as
deduced from hypothetical premises about assumed though
imperceptible entities (e.g., points) but as the science of
actual space, which is a complex of relations between
extended things. From perceivable elements and relations, he
logically constructed entities that are related to each
other just as points are in geometry. That was only the
beginning of his task, for Albert Einstein had revised the
ideas of space, time, and motion. Whitehead was convinced
that these three concepts should be based upon the general
character of men’s perception of the external world. In 1919
he published his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Natural Knowledge; it was both searching and constructive
but too philosophical and too complicated to influence
physicists.
Whitehead had begun to have discussions of the perceptual
basis of scientific knowledge with philosophers in 1915, and
he followed up his Enquiry with a nonmathematical book, The
Concept of Nature (1920). Though he rejected Idealistic
views of the relation of nature to perceiving minds, neither
was he a Realist of the school led by Russell and G.E.
Moore. In maintaining that events are the basic components
of nature and that passage, or creative advance, is its most
fundamental feature—doctrines that foreshadowed his later
metaphysics—Whitehead was somewhat influenced by Henri
Bergson’s antimechanistic philosophy of change. Yet he was
something of a Platonist; he saw the definite character of
events as due to the “ingression” of timeless entities.
Career in the United States.
In the early 1920s Whitehead was clearly the most
distinguished philosopher of science writing in English.
When a friend of Harvard University, the historical scholar
Henry Osborn Taylor, pledged the money for his salary,
Harvard early in 1924 offered Whitehead a five-year
appointment as professor of philosophy. He was 63 years old,
with at most two more years to go in the Imperial College.
The idea of teaching philosophy appealed to him, and his
wife wholeheartedly concurred in the move. Harvard soon
found that it had acquired more than a philosopher of
science; it had acquired a metaphysician, one comparable in
stature to Gottfried Leibniz and Georg Hegel.
Early in 1925, he gave a course of eight lectures in
Boston, published that same year (with additions—among them
his earliest writing about God) as Science and the Modern
World. In it he dramatically described what had long engaged
his meditation; namely, the rise, triumph, and impact of
“scientific Materialism”—i.e., the view that nature consists
of nothing else but matter in motion, or a flux of purely
physical energy. He criticized this Materialism as mistaking
an abstract system of mathematical physics for the concrete
reality of nature. Whitehead’s mind was at home with such
abstractions, and he saw them as real discoveries, not
intellectual inventions; but his sense for the fullness of
existence led him to urge upon philosophy the task of making
good their omissions by reverting to the variety of concrete
experience and then framing broader ideas. The importance of
this book was immediately recognized. What perhaps impressed
most readers was Whitehead’s appeal to his favourite poets,
William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, against the
exclusion of values from nature.
In 1926, the compact book Religion in the Making
appeared. In it, Whitehead interpreted religion as reaching
its deepest level in humanity’s solitude, that is, as an
attitude of the individual toward the universe rather than
as a social phenomenon.
In January 1927 the University of Edinburgh invited him
to give a set of 10 Gifford Lectures in the ensuing academic
year. For this, Whitehead drew up the complex technical
structure of “the philosophy of organism” (as he called his
metaphysics) and thought through his agreements and
disagreements with some of the great European philosophers.
It was characteristic of him to insist, against David Hume,
that an adequate philosophical theory must build on
“practice” and not be supplemented by it. The lectures
reflected Whitehead’s speculative hypothesis that the
universe consists entirely of becomings, each of them a
process of appropriating and integrating the infinity of
items (“reality”) provided by the antecedent universe and by
God (the abiding source of novel possibilities). When, in
June 1928, the time for delivering the lectures arrived and
Whitehead presented this system in its new and difficult
terminology, his audience rapidly vanished, but the
publication of the lectures, expanded to 25 chapters, gave
Western metaphysics one of its greatest books, Process and
Reality (1929).
Whitehead had an unwavering faith in the possibility of
understanding existence and a superb power to construct a
scheme of general ideas broad enough to overcome the classic
dualisms. But he knew that no system can do more than make
an approach, somewhat more adequate than its predecessors,
to understanding the infinitude of existence. He had seen
the collapse of the long-entrenched Newtonian system of
physics, and he never forgot its lesson. Henceforth dogmatic
assurance, whether in philosophy, science, or theology, was
his enemy.
Adventures of Ideas (1933) was Whitehead’s last big
philosophical book and the most rewarding one for the
general reader. It offered penetrating, balanced reflections
on the parts played by brute forces and by general ideas
about humanity, God, and the universe in shaping the course
of Western civilization. Whitehead emphasized the impulse of
life toward newness and the absolute need for societies
stable enough to nourish adventure that is fruitful rather
than anarchic. In this book he also summarized his
metaphysics and used it to elucidate the nature of beauty,
truth, art, adventure, and peace. By “peace” he meant a
religious attitude that is “primarily a trust in the
efficacy of beauty.”
Except for an insufficient familiarity with Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud, Whitehead was at home in both the scientific
and the literary cultures of his time. Young people flocked
to “Sunday evenings,” which his wife skillfully managed.
Here the spare, rosy-cheeked man, who might have been of
average height if he had not been so stooped, talked to them
in a high-pitched but gentle voice—talked not about his
system but about whatever was on their minds, sharply
illuminating it from a broad and historical perspective.
In his Harvard lectures, as in his books, Whitehead liked
best to explore the scope of application of an idea and to
show how intuitions that were traditionally opposed could
supplement each other, which he did by dint of his own
ideas. Most students found attendance at his lectures a
great experience. Harvard did not retire him until 1937.
In his first years in the United States, Whitehead
visited many eastern and midwestern campuses as a lecturer.
Though he loved Americans, he remained always very much an
Englishman. A Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903, he was
elected to the British Academy in 1931. In 1945 he received
the Order of Merit. After his death his body was cremated,
and there was no funeral. His unpublished manuscripts and
correspondence were destroyed by his widow, as he had
wanted.
Assessment.
Whitehead has not had disciples, though his admirers have
included leaders in every field of thought. His educational
and philosophical books have been translated into many
languages. His metaphysics has been keenly studied, in the
United States most of all. What is now called Whitehead’s
“process theology” is easily the most influential part of
his system; this is partly due to the influence of the U.S.
philosopher Charles Hartshorne.
Whitehead’s habit of helpfulness made him universally
beloved. Though his courtesy was perfect, there was nothing
soft about him; never contentious, he was astute,
charitable, and quietly stubborn. He had a realistic,
well-poised mind and a fine irony free of malice. Whitehead
combined singular gifts of intuition, intellectual power,
and goodness with firmness and wisdom.
Victor Lowe
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Contemporary philosophy » Marxist thought
The framework of 19th-century Marxism, augmented by philosophical
suggestions from Lenin, served as the starting point of all
philosophizing in the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites.
Much of Lenin’s thinking was also devoted to more practical issues,
however, such as tactics of violence and the role of the Communist Party
in bringing about and consolidating the proletarian revolution. Later
Marxism continued this practical concern, largely because it retained
the basic Marxist conception of what philosophy is and ought to be.
Marxism (like pragmatism) assimilated theoretical issues to practical
needs. It asserted the basic unity of theory and practice by finding
that the function of the former was to serve the latter. Marx and
Lenin
both held that theory was always, in fact, expressive of class
interests; consequently, they wished philosophy to be transformed into a
tool for furthering the class struggle. The task of philosophy was not
abstractly to discover the truth but concretely to forge the
intellectual weapons of the proletariat. Thus, philosophy became
inseparable from ideology.
|
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
prime minister of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk,
Russia
died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near
Moscow
Overview
Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the
Russian Revolution of 1917, and architect and builder of the
Soviet state.
Born to a middle-class family, he was strongly influenced
by his eldest brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged in 1887 for
conspiring to assassinate the tsar. He studied law and
became a Marxist in 1889 while practicing law. He was
arrested as a subversive in 1895 and exiled to Siberia,
where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. They lived in western
Europe after 1900. At the 1903 meeting in London of the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, he emerged as the
leader of the Bolshevik faction. In several revolutionary
newspapers that he founded and edited, he put forth his
theory of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat, a
centralized body organized around a core of professional
revolutionaries; his ideas, later known as Leninism, would
be joined with Karl Marx’s theories to form
Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist worldview. With
the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, he returned
to Russia, but he resumed his exile in 1907 and continued
his energetic agitation for the next 10 years. He saw World
War I as an opportunity to turn a war of nations into a war
of classes, and he returned to Russia with the Russian
Revolution of 1917 to lead the Bolshevik coup that overthrew
the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky. As
revolutionary leader of the Soviet state, he signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (1918) and repulsed
counterrevolutionary threats in the Russian Civil War. He
founded the Comintern in 1919. His policy of War Communism
prevailed until 1921, and to forestall economic disaster he
launched the New Economic Policy. In ill health from 1922,
he died of a stroke in 1924.
Main
founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),
inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and
the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the
Soviet state. He was the founder of the organization known
as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous
source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined
with Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form
Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview.
If the Bolshevik Revolution is—as some people have called
it—the most significant political event of the 20th century,
then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s
most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly
circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many
non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the
greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in
history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since
Marx.
Early life » The making of a revolutionary
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his
childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a
professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born
in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He
adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine
party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six
children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly
educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter
of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf,
became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector
of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong,
and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a
voracious passion for learning. He was graduated from high
school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself
in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a
classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin
indicated a future rebel, still less a professional
revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But,
despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing,
all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined
the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon
phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated
and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and
political rights.
As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that
unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take
the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened
shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement
by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the
spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved
eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of
St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University),
was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist
group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III.
Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the
family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state
criminal.”
Fortunately the income from his mother’s pension and
inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances,
although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or
exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s high school
principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later
to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin’s
Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn
his back on the “criminal’s” family. He courageously wrote a
character reference that smoothed Lenin’s admission to a
university.
In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of
the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I.
Lenin] State University), but within three months he was
expelled from the school, having been accused of
participating in an illegal student assembly. He was
arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate
in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna
had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the
autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to
Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During
this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled
revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read
revolutionary political literature, especially Marx’s Das
Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.
Early life » Formation of a revolutionary party
In May 1889 the Ulyanov family moved to Samara (known as
Kuybyshev from 1935 to 1991). After much petitioning, Lenin
was granted permission to take his law examinations. In
November 1891 he passed his examinations, taking a first in
all subjects, and was graduated with a first-class degree.
After the police finally waived their political objections,
Lenin was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Samara in
1892–93, his clients being mainly poor peasants and
artisans. In his experience practicing law, he acquired an
intense loathing for the class bias of the legal system and
a lifelong revulsion for lawyers, even those who claimed to
be Social-Democrats.
Law proved to be an extremely useful cover for a
revolutionary activist. He moved to St. Petersburg (from
1914 to 1924 known as Petrograd; from 1924 to 1991 known as
Leningrad) in August 1893 and, while working as a public
defender, associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. In
1895 his comrades sent him abroad to make contact with
Russian exiles in western Europe, especially with Russia’s
most commanding Marxist thinker, Georgy Plekhanov. Upon his
return to Russia in 1895, Lenin and other Marxists,
including L. Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks,
succeeded in unifying the Marxist groups of the capital in
an organization known as the Union for the Struggle for the
Liberation of the Working Class. The Union issued leaflets
and proclamations on the workers’ behalf, supported workers’
strikes, and infiltrated workers’ education classes to
impart to them the rudiments of Marxism. In December 1895,
the leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for
15 months and thereafter was sent into exile to
Shushenskoye, in Siberia, for a term of three years. He was
joined there in exile by his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a
Union member, whom he had met in the capital. They were
married in Siberia, and she became Lenin’s indispensable
secretary and comrade. In exile they conducted clandestine
party correspondence and collaborated (legally) on a Russian
translation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial
Democracy.
Upon completing his term of Siberian exile in January
1900, Lenin left the country and was joined later by
Krupskaya in Munich. His first major task abroad was to join
Plekhanov, Martov, and three other editors in bringing out
the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which they hoped would
unify the Russian Marxist groups that were scattered
throughout Russia and western Europe into a cohesive
Social-Democratic party.
Up to the point at which Lenin began working on Iskra,
his writings had taken as their focus three problems: first,
he had written a number of leaflets that aimed to shake the
workers’ traditional veneration of the tsar by showing them
that their harsh life was caused, in part, by the support
tsarism rendered the capitalists; second, he attacked those
self-styled Marxists who urged Social-Democrats and workers
to concentrate on wage and hour issues, leaving the
political struggle for the present to the bourgeoisie;
third, and ultimately most important, he addressed himself
to the peasant question.
The principal obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by
many of the Russian intelligentsia was their adherence to
the widespread belief of the Populists (Russian pre-Marxist
radicals) that Marxism was inapplicable to peasant Russia,
in which a proletariat (an industrial working class) was
almost nonexistent. Russia, they believed, was immune to
capitalism, owing to the circumstances of joint ownership of
peasant land by the village commune. This view had been
first attacked by Plekhanov in the 1880s. Plekhanov had
argued that Russia had already entered the capitalist stage,
looking for evidence to the rapid growth of industry.
Despite the denials of the Populists, he claimed, the man of
the future in Russia was indeed the proletarian, not the
peasant. While attempting to apply the Marxist scheme of
social development to Russia, Plekhanov had come to the
conclusion that the revolution in Russia would have to pass
through two discrete stages: first, a bourgeois revolution
that would establish a democratic republic and full-blown
capitalism; and second, a proletarian revolution after
mature capitalism had generated a numerous proletariat that
had attained a high level of political organization,
socialist consciousness, and culture, enabling them to usher
in full Socialism.
It was this set of principles that Lenin adhered to after
he read Plekhanov’s work in the late 1880s. But, almost
immediately, Lenin went a step beyond his former mentor,
especially with regard to the peasant question. In an attack
on the Populists published in 1894, Lenin charged that, even
if they realized their fondest dream and divided all the
land among the peasant communes, the result would not be
Socialism but rather capitalism spawned by a free market in
agricultural produce. The “Socialism” put forth by the
Populists would in practice favour the development of
small-scale capitalism; hence the Populists were not
Socialists but “petty bourgeois democrats.” Lenin came to
the conclusion that outside of Marxism, which aimed
ultimately to abolish the market system as well as the
private ownership of the means of production, there could be
no Socialism.
Even while in exile in Siberia, Lenin had begun research
on his investigation of the peasant question, which
culminated in his magisterial Development of Capitalism in
Russia (published legally in 1899). In this work, a study of
Russian economics, he argued that capitalism was rapidly
destroying the peasant commune. The peasantry constituted
for the Populists a homogeneous social class, but Lenin
claimed that the peasantry was in actuality rapidly
stratifying into a well-off rural bourgeoisie, a middling
peasantry, and an impoverished rural “proletariat and
semi-proletariat.” In this last group, which comprised half
the peasant population, Lenin found an ally for the
extremely small industrial proletariat in Russia.
Iskra’s success in recruiting Russian intellectuals to
Marxism led Lenin and his comrades to believe that the time
was ripe to found a revolutionary Marxist party that would
weld together all the disparate Marxist groups at home and
abroad. An abortive First Congress, held in 1898 in Minsk,
had failed to achieve this objective, for most of the
delegates were arrested shortly after the congress. The
organizing committee of the Second Congress decided to
convene the congress in Brussels in 1903, but police
pressure forced it to transfer to London.
The congressional sessions wore on for nearly three
weeks, for no point appeared too trivial to debate. The main
issues, nevertheless, quickly became plain: eligibility for
membership and the character of party discipline; but, above
all, the key questions centred around the relation between
the party and the proletariat, for whom the party claimed to
speak.
In his What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin totally rejected
the standpoint that the proletariat was being driven
spontaneously to revolutionary Socialism by capitalism and
that the party’s role should be to merely coordinate the
struggle of the proletariat’s diverse sections on a national
and international scale. Capitalism, he contended,
predisposed the workers to the acceptance of Socialism but
did not spontaneously make them conscious Socialists. The
proletariat by its own efforts in the everyday struggle
against the capitalist could go so far as to achieve
“trade-union consciousness.” But the proletariat could not
by its own efforts grasp that it would be possible to win
complete emancipation only by overthrowing capitalism and
building Socialism, unless the party from without infused it
with Socialist consciousness.
In his What Is To Be Done? and in his other works dealing
with party organization, Lenin articulated one of his most
momentous political innovations, his theory of the party as
the “vanguard of the proletariat.” He conceived of the
vanguard as a highly disciplined, centralized party that
would work unremittingly to suffuse the proletariat with
Socialist consciousness and serve as mentor, leader, and
guide, constantly showing the proletariat where its true
class interests lie.
At the Second Congress the Iskra group split, and Lenin
found himself in a minority of opinion on this very issue.
Nevertheless, he continued to develop his view of “the party
of a new type,” which was to be guided by “democratic
centralism,” or absolute party discipline. According to
Lenin the party had to be a highly centralized body
organized around a small, ideologically homogeneous,
hardened core of experienced professional revolutionaries,
who would be elected to the central committee by the party
congress and who would lead a ramified hierarchy of lower
party organizations that would enjoy the support and
sympathy of the proletariat and all groups opposed to
tsarism. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin
exclaimed, “and we will overturn Russia!”
Lenin spared no effort to build just this kind of party
over the next 20 years, despite fierce attacks on his
position by some of his closest comrades of the Iskra days,
Plekhanov, Martov, and Leon Trotsky. They charged that his
scheme of party organization and discipline tended toward
“Jacobinism,” suppression of free intraparty discussion, a
dictatorship over the proletariat, not of the proletariat,
and, finally, establishment of a one-man dictatorship.
Lenin found himself in the minority in the early sessions
of the Second Congress of what was then proclaimed to be the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). But a
walkout by a disgruntled group of Jewish Social-Democrats,
the Bund, left Lenin with a slight majority. Consequently,
the members of Lenin’s adventitious majority were called
Bolsheviks (majoritarians), and Martov’s group were dubbed
Mensheviks (minoritarians). The two groups fought each other
ceaselessly within the same RSDWP and professed the same
program until 1912, when Lenin made the split final at the
Prague Conference of the Bolshevik Party.
Challenges of the Revolution of 1905 and World War I
The differences between Lenin and the Mensheviks became
sharper in the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, when
Lenin moved to a distinctly original view on two issues:
class alignments in the revolution and the character of the
post-revolutionary regime.
The outbreak of the revolution, in January 1905, found
Lenin abroad in Switzerland, and he did not return to Russia
until November. Immediately Lenin set down a novel strategy.
Both wings of the RSDWP, Bolshevik and Menshevik, adhered to
Plekhanov’s view of the revolution in two stages: first, a
bourgeois revolution; second, a proletarian revolution (see
above). But the Mensheviks argued that the bourgeois
revolution must be led by the bourgeoisie, with whom the
proletariat must ally itself in order to make the democratic
revolution. This would bring the liberal bourgeoisie to full
power, whereupon the RSDWP would act as the party of
opposition. Lenin defiantly rejected this kind of alliance
and post-revolutionary regime. Hitherto he had spoken of the
need for the proletariat to win “hegemony” in the democratic
revolution. Now he flatly declared that the proletariat was
the driving force of the revolution and that its only
reliable ally was the peasantry. The bourgeoisie he branded
as hopelessly counterrevolutionary and too cowardly to make
its own revolution. Thus, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin
henceforth banked on an alliance that would establish a
“revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat
and the peasantry.”
Nor would the revolution necessarily stop at the first
stage, the bourgeois revolution. If the Russian revolution
should inspire the western European proletariat to make the
Socialist revolution, for which industrial Europe was ripe,
the Russian revolution might well pass over directly to the
second stage, the Socialist revolution. Then, the Russian
proletariat, supported by the rural proletariat and
semi-proletariat at home and assisted by the triumphant
industrial proletariat of the West, which had established
its “dictatorship of the proletariat,” could cut short the
life-span of Russian capitalism.
After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, the issue
between Lenin and the Mensheviks was more clearly drawn than
ever, despite efforts at reunion. But, forced again into
exile from 1907 to 1917, Lenin found serious challenges to
his policies not only from the Mensheviks but within his own
faction as well. The combination of repression and modest
reform effected by the tsarist regime led to a decline of
party membership. Disillusionment and despair in the chances
of successful revolution swept the dwindled party ranks,
rent by controversies over tactics and philosophy. Attempts
to unite the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions came to
naught, all breaking on Lenin’s intransigent insistence that
his conditions for reunification be adopted. As one
Menshevik opponent described Lenin: “There is no other man
who is absorbed by the revolution twenty-four hours a day,
who has no other thoughts but the thought of revolution, and
who even when he sleeps, dreams of nothing but revolution.”
Placing revolution above party unity, Lenin would accept no
unity compromise if he thought it might delay, not
accelerate, revolution.
Desperately fighting to maintain the cohesion of the
Bolsheviks against internal differences and the Mensheviks’
growing strength at home, Lenin convened the Bolshevik Party
Conference at Prague, in 1912, which split the Rsdwp
forever. Lenin proclaimed that the Bolsheviks were the RSDWP
and that the Mensheviks were schismatics. Thereafter, each
faction maintained its separate central committee, party
apparatus, and press.
When war broke out, in August 1914, Socialist parties
throughout Europe rallied behind their governments despite
the resolutions of prewar congresses of the Second
International obliging them to resist or even overthrow
their respective governments if they plunged their countries
into an imperialist war.
After Lenin recovered from his initial disbelief in this
“betrayal” of the International, he proclaimed a policy
whose audacity stunned his own Bolshevik comrades. He
denounced the pro-war Socialists as “social-chauvinists” who
had betrayed the international working-class cause by
support of a war that was imperialist on both sides. He
pronounced the Second International as dead and appealed for
the creation of a new, Third International composed of
genuinely revolutionary Socialist parties. More immediately,
revolutionary Socialists must work to “transform the
imperialist war into civil war.” The real enemy of the
worker was not the worker in the opposite trench but the
capitalist at home. Workers and soldiers should therefore
turn their guns on their rulers and destroy the system that
had plunged them into imperialist carnage.
Lenin’s policy found few advocates in Russia or elsewhere
in the first months of the war. Indeed, in the first flush
of patriotic fervour, not a few Bolsheviks supported the war
effort. Lenin and his closest comrades were left an isolated
band swimming against the current.
Lenin succeeded in reaching neutral Switzerland in
September 1914, there joining a small group of anti-war
Bolshevik and Menshevik émigrés. The war virtually cut them
off from all contact with Russia and with like-minded
Socialists in other countries. Nevertheless, in 1915 and
1916, anti-war Socialists in various countries managed to
hold two anti-war conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal,
Switzerland. Lenin failed at both meetings to persuade his
comrades to adopt his slogan: “transform the imperialist war
into civil war!” They adopted instead the more moderate
formula: “An immediate peace without annexations or
indemnities and the right of the peoples to
self-determination.” Lenin consequently found his party a
minority within the group of anti-war Socialists, who, in
turn, constituted a small minority of the international
Socialist movement compared with the pro-war Socialists.
Undaunted, Lenin continued to hammer home his views on
the war, confident that eventually he would win decisive
support. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1917), he set out to explain, first, the real causes of the
war; second, why Socialists had abandoned internationalism
for patriotism and supported the war; and third, why
revolution alone could bring about a just, democratic peace.
War erupted, he wrote, because of the insatiable,
expansionist character of imperialism, itself a product of
monopoly finance capitalism. At the end of the 19th century,
a handful of banks had come to dominate the advanced
countries, which, by 1914, had in their respective empires
brought the rest of the world under their direct or indirect
controls. Amassing vast quantities of “surplus” capital, the
giant banks found they could garner superprofits on
investments in colonies and semi-colonies, and this
intensified the race for empire among the great powers. By
1914, dissatisfied with the way the world had been shared
out, rival coalitions of imperialists launched the war to
bring about a redivision of the world at the expense of the
other coalition. The war was therefore imperialist in its
origins and aims and deserved the condemnation of genuine
Socialists.
Socialist Party and trade-union leaders had rallied to
support their respective imperialist governments because
they represented the “labour aristocracy,” the better paid
workers who received a small share of the colonial
“superprofits” the imperialists proffered them. “Bribed” by
the imperialists, the “labour aristocracy” took the side of
their paymasters in the imperialist war and betrayed the
most exploited workers at home and the super-exploited in
the colonies. The imperialists, Lenin contended, driven by
an annexationist dynamic, could not conclude a just, lasting
peace. Future wars were inevitable so long as imperialism
existed; imperialism was inevitable so long as capitalism
existed; only the overthrow of capitalism everywhere could
end the imperialist war and prevent such wars in the future.
First published in Russia in 1917, Imperialism to this day
provides the instrument that Communists everywhere employ to
evaluate major trends in the non-Communist world.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution
By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and
that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in
the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary
workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St.
Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his
closest lieutenants hastened home after the German
authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany
to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war
Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » First return to
Petrograd
Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16, 1917, one month
after the Tsar had been forced to abdicate. Out of the
revolution was born the Provisional Government, formed by a
group of leaders of the bourgeois liberal parties. This
government’s accession to power was made possible only by
the assent of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’
deputies elected in the factories of the capital. Similar
soviets of workers’ deputies sprang up in all the major
cities and towns throughout the country, as did soviets of
soldiers’ deputies and of peasants’ deputies. Although the
Petrograd Soviet had been the sole political power
recognized by the revolutionary workers and soldiers in
March 1917, its leaders had hastily turned full power over
to the Provisional Government. The Petrograd Soviet was
headed by a majority composed of Menshevik and Socialist
Revolutionary (SR), or peasant party, leaders who regarded
the March (February, O.S.) Revolution as bourgeois; hence,
they believed that the new regime should be headed by
leaders of the bourgeois parties.
On his return to Russia, Lenin electrified his own
comrades, most of whom accepted the authority of the
Provisional Government. Lenin called this government,
despite its democratic pretensions, thoroughly imperialist
and undeserving of support by Socialists. It was incapable
of satisfying the most profound desires of the workers,
soldiers, and peasants for immediate peace and division of
landed estates among the peasants.
Only a soviet government—that is, direct rule by workers,
soldiers, and peasants—could fulfill these demands.
Therefore, he raised the battle cry, “All power to the
Soviets!”—although the Bolsheviks still constituted a
minority within the soviets and despite the manifest
unwillingness of the Menshevik–SR majority to exercise such
power. This introduced what Lenin called the period of “dual
power.” Under the leadership of “opportunist” Socialists,
the soviets, the real power, had relinquished power to the
Provisional Government, the nominal power in the land. The
Bolsheviks, Lenin exhorted, must persuade the workers,
peasants, and soldiers, temporarily deceived by the
“opportunists,” to retrieve state power for the soviets from
the Provisional Government. This would constitute a second
revolution. But, so long as the government did not suppress
the revolutionary parties, this revolution could be achieved
peacefully, since the Provisional Government existed only by
the sufferance of the soviets.
Initially, Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks thought that he was
temporarily disoriented by the complexity of the situation;
moderate Socialists thought him mad. It required several
weeks of sedulous persuasion by Lenin before he won the
Bolshevik Party Central Committee to his view. The April
Party Conference endorsed his program: the party must
withhold support from the Provisional Government and win a
majority in the soviets in favour of soviet power. A soviet
government, once established, should begin immediate
negotiations for a general peace on all fronts. The soviets
should forthwith confiscate landlords’ estates without
compensation, nationalize all land, and divide it among the
peasants. And the government should establish tight controls
over privately owned industry to the benefit of labour.
From March to September 1917, the Bolsheviks remained a
minority in the soviets. By autumn, however, the Provisional
Government (since July headed by the moderate Socialist
Aleksandr Kerensky, who was supported by the moderate
Socialist leadership of the soviets) had lost popular
support. Increasing war-weariness and the breakdown of the
economy overtaxed the patience of the workers, peasants, and
soldiers, who demanded immediate and fundamental change.
Lenin capitalized on the growing disillusionment of the
people with Kerensky’s ability and willingness to complete
the revolution. Kerensky, in turn, claimed that only a
freely elected constituent assembly would have the power to
decide Russia’s political future—but that must await the
return of order. Meanwhile, Lenin and the party demanded
peace, land, and bread—immediately, without further delay.
The Bolshevik line won increasing support among the workers,
soldiers, and peasants. By September they voted in a
Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet and in the
soviets of the major cities and towns throughout the
country.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Decision to seize
power
Lenin, who had gone underground in July after he had been
accused as a “German agent” by Kerensky’s government, now
decided that the time was ripe to seize power. The party
must immediately begin preparations for an armed uprising to
depose the Provisional Government and transfer state power
to the soviets, now headed by a Bolshevik majority.
Lenin’s decision to establish soviet power derived from
his belief that the proletarian revolution must smash the
existing state machinery and introduce a “dictatorship of
the proletariat”; that is, direct rule by the armed workers
and peasants which would eventually “wither away” into a
non-coercive, classless, stateless, Communist society. He
expounded this view most trenchantly in his brochure The
State and Revolution, written while he was still in hiding.
The brochure, though never completed and often dismissed as
Lenin’s most “Utopian” work, nevertheless served as Lenin’s
doctrinal springboard to power.
Until 1917 all revolutionary Socialists rightly believed,
Lenin wrote, that a parliamentary republic could serve a
Socialist system as well as a capitalist. But the Russian
Revolution had brought forth something new, the soviets.
Created by workers, soldiers, and peasants and excluding the
propertied classes, the soviets infinitely surpassed the
most democratic of parliaments in democracy, because
parliaments everywhere virtually excluded workers and
peasants. The choice before Russia in early September 1917,
as Lenin saw it, was either a soviet republic—a dictatorship
of the propertyless majority—or a parliamentary republic—as
he saw it, a dictatorship of the propertied minority.
Lenin therefore raised the slogan, “All power to the
Soviets!”, even though he had willingly conceded in the
spring of 1917 that revolutionary Russia was the “freest of
all the belligerent countries.” To Lenin, however, the
Provisional Government was merely a “dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie” that kept Russia in the imperialist war. What
is more, it had turned openly counterrevolutionary in the
month of July when it accused the Bolshevik leaders of
treason.
From late September, Lenin, a fugitive in Finland, sent a
stream of articles and letters to Petrograd feverishly
exhorting the Party Central Committee to organize an armed
uprising without delay. The opportune moment might be lost.
But for nearly a month Lenin’s forceful urgings from afar
were unsuccessful. As in April, Lenin again found himself in
the party minority. He resorted to a desperate stratagem.
Around October 20, Lenin, in disguise and at considerable
personal risk, slipped into Petrograd and attended a secret
meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee held on the
evening of October 23. Not until after a heated 10-hour
debate did he finally win a majority in favour of preparing
an armed takeover. Now steps to enlist the support of
soldiers and sailors and to train the Red Guards, the
Bolshevik-led workers’ militia, for an armed takeover
proceeded openly under the guise of self-defense of the
Petrograd Soviet. But preparations moved haltingly, because
serious opposition to the fateful decision persisted in the
Central Committee. Enthusiastically in accord with Lenin on
the timeliness of an armed uprising, Trotsky led its
preparation from his strategic position as newly elected
chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin, now hiding in
Petrograd and fearful of further procrastination,
desperately pressed the Central Committee to fix an early
date for the uprising. On the evening of November 6, he
wrote a letter to the members of the Central Committee
exhorting them to proceed that very evening to arrest the
members of the Provisional Government. To delay would be
“fatal.” The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets,
scheduled to convene the next evening, should be placed
before a fait accompli.
On November 7 and 8, the Bolshevik-led Red Guards and
revolutionary soldiers and sailors, meeting only slight
resistance, deposed the Provisional Government and
proclaimed that state power had passed into the hands of the
Soviets. By this time the Bolsheviks, with their allies
among the Left SR’s (dissidents who broke with the
pro-Kerensky SR leaders), constituted an absolute majority
of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The delegates
therefore voted overwhelmingly to accept full power and
elected Lenin as chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars, the new Soviet Government, and approved his
Peace Decree and Land Decree. Overnight, Lenin had vaulted
from his hideout as a fugitive to head the Revolutionary
government of the largest country in the world. Since his
youth he had spent his life building a party that would win
such a victory, and now at the age of 47 he and his party
had triumphed. “It makes one’s head spin,” he confessed. But
power neither intoxicated nor frightened Lenin; it cleared
his head. Soberly, he steered the Soviet government toward
the consolidation of its power and negotiations for peace.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Saving the Revolution
In both spheres, Lenin was plagued by breaks within the
ranks of Bolshevik leaders. He reluctantly agreed with the
right-wingers that it would be desirable to include the
Menshevik and Right SR parties in a coalition government—but
on Lenin’s terms. They must above all accept the soviet form
of government, not a parliamentary one; they refused. Only
the Left SR’s agreed, and several were included in the
Soviet government. Likewise, when the freely elected
Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, the Mensheviks and
Right SR majority flatly rejected sovietism. Lenin without
hesitation ordered the dispersal of the Constituent
Assembly.
The Allies refused to recognize the Soviet government;
consequently it entered alone into peace negotiations with
the Central Powers (Germany and her allies Austro-Hungary
and Turkey) at the town of Brest-Litovsk. They imposed
ruinous conditions that would strip away from Soviet Russia
the western tier of non-Russian nations of the old Russian
Empire. Left Communists fanatically opposed acceptance and
preached a revolutionary war, even if it imperilled the
Soviet government. Lenin insisted that the terms, however
ruinous and humiliating, must be accepted or he would resign
from the government. He sensed that peace was the deepest
yearning of the people; in any case, the shattered army
could not raise effective resistance to the invader.
Finally, in March 1918, after a still larger part had been
carved out of old Russia by the enemy, Lenin succeeded in
winning the Central Committee’s acceptance of the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk. At last Russia was at peace.
But Brest-Litovsk only intensified the determination of
counterrevolutionary forces and the Allies who supported
them to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government.
That determination hardened when, in 1918, Lenin’s
government repudiated repayments of all foreign loans
obtained by the tsarist and Provisional governments and
nationalized foreign properties in Russia without
compensation. From 1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a Civil
War, which cost millions of lives and untold destruction.
One of the earliest victims was Lenin himself. In August
1918 an assassin fired two bullets into Lenin as he left a
factory in which he had just delivered a speech. Because of
his robust constitution, he recovered rapidly.
The Soviet government faced tremendous odds. The
anti-Soviet forces, or Whites, headed mainly by former
tsarist generals and admirals, fought desperately to
overthrow the Red regime. Moreover, the Whites were lavishly
supplied by the Allies with materiel, money, and support
troops that secured White bases. Yet, the Whites failed.
It was largely because of Lenin’s inspired leadership
that the Soviet government managed to survive against such
military odds. He caused the formation and guided the
strategy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, commanded
by Trotsky. Although the economy had collapsed, he managed
to mobilize sufficient resources to sustain the Red Army and
the industrial workers. But above all it was his political
leadership that saved the day for the Soviets. By
proclaiming the right of the peoples to self-determination,
including the right to secession, he won the active
sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the
non-Russian nationalities within Russia, because the Whites
did not recognize that right. Indeed, his perceptive,
skillful policy on the national question enabled Soviet
Russia to avoid total disintegration and to remain a huge
multinational state. By making the industrial workers the
new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of
rations, housing, and political power, he retained the
loyalty of the proletariat. His championing of the peasants’
demand that they take all the land from the gentry, church,
and crown without compensation won over the peasants,
without whose support the government could not survive.
Because of the breakdown of the economy, however, Lenin
adopted a policy toward the peasant that threatened to
destroy the Soviet government. Lacking funds or goods to
exchange against grain needed to feed the Red Army and the
towns, Lenin instituted a system of requisitioning grain
surpluses without compensation. Many peasants resisted—at
least until they experienced White “liberation.” On the
territories that the Whites won, they restored landed
property to the previous owners and savagely punished the
peasants who had dared seize the land. Despite the peasants’
detestation of the Soviet’s grain requisitioning, the
peasants, when forced to choose between Reds and Whites,
chose the Reds.
After the defeat of the Whites, the peasants no longer
had to make that choice. They now totally refused to
surrender their grain to the government. Threatened by mass
peasant rebellion, Lenin called a retreat. In March 1921 the
government introduced the New Economic Policy, which ended
the system of grain requisitioning and permitted the peasant
to sell his harvest on an open market. This constituted a
partial retreat to capitalism.
From the moment Lenin came to power, his abiding aims in
international relations were twofold: to prevent the
formation of an imperialist united front against Soviet
Russia; but, even more important, to stimulate proletarian
revolutions abroad.
In his first aim he largely succeeded. In 1924, shortly
after his death, Soviet Russia had won de jure recognition
of all the major world powers except the United States. But
his greater hope of the formation of a world republic of
soviets failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia was left
isolated in hostile capitalist encirclement.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Formation of the
Third International
To break this encirclement, he had called on revolutionaries
to form Communist parties that would emulate the example of
the Bolshevik Revolution in all countries. Dramatizing his
break with the reformist Second International, in 1918 he
had changed the name of the RSDWP to the Russian Communist
Party (Bolsheviks), and in March 1919 he founded the
Communist, or Third, International. This International
accepted the affiliation only of parties that accepted its
decisions as binding, imposed iron discipline, and made a
clean break with the Second International. In sum, Lenin now
held up the Russian Communist Party, the only party that had
made a successful revolution, as the model for Communist
parties in all countries. One result of this policy was to
engender a split in the world labour movement between the
adherents of the two internationals.
The Communist International scored its greatest success
in the colonial world. By championing the rights of the
peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies to
self-determination and independence, the International won
considerable sympathy for Communism. Lenin’s policy in this
question still reverberates through the world today. And it
offers another example of Lenin’s unique ability to find
allies where revolutionaries had not found them before. By
taking the side of the national liberation movements, Lenin
could claim that the overwhelming majority of the world’s
population, then living under imperialist rule, as well as
the European proletariat, were the natural allies of the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Thus Lenin’s revolutionary genius was not confined to his
ability to divide his enemies; more important was his skill
in finding allies and friends for the exiguous proletariat
of Russia. First, he won the Russian peasants to the side of
the proletariat. Second, while he did not win the workers to
make successful Communist revolutions in the West, they did
compel their governments to curtail armed intervention
against the Bolshevik Revolution. Third, while the Asian
revolutions barely stirred in his lifetime, they did
strengthen the Soviet Communists in the belief that they
were not alone in a hostile world.
By 1921 Lenin’s government had crushed all opposition
parties on the grounds that they had opposed or failed to
support sufficiently the Soviet cause in the Civil War. Now
that peace had come, Lenin believed that their opposition
was more dangerous than ever, since the peasantry and even a
large section of the working class had become disaffected
with the Soviet regime. To repress opponents of Bolshevism,
Lenin demanded the harshest measures, including “show”
trials and frequent resort to the death penalty. Moreover,
he insisted on even tighter control over dissent within the
party. Lenin’s insistence on merciless destruction of the
opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship subsequently led
many observers to conclude that Lenin, though personally
opposed to one-man rule, nevertheless unwittingly cleared
the way for the rise of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship.
By 1922 Lenin had become keenly aware that degeneration
of the Soviet system and party was the greatest danger to
the cause of Socialism in Russia. He found the party and
Soviet state apparatus hopelessly entangled in red tape and
incompetence. Even the agency headed by Stalin that was
responsible for streamlining administration was, in fact,
less efficient than the rest of the government. The Soviets
of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies had been drained of all
power, which had flowed to the centre. Most disturbing was
the Great Russian chauvinism that leading Bolsheviks
manifested toward the non-Russian nationalities in the
reorganization of the state in which Stalin was playing a
key role. Moreover, in April 1922 Stalin won appointment as
general secretary of the party, in which post he was rapidly
concentrating immense power in his hands. Soviet Russia in
Lenin’s last years could not have been more remote from the
picture of Socialism he had portrayed in State and
Revolution. Lenin strained every nerve to reverse these
trends, which he regarded as antithetical to Socialism, and
to replace Stalin.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Illness and death
In the spring of 1922, however, Lenin fell seriously ill. In
April his doctors extracted from his neck one of the bullets
he had received from the assassin’s gun in August 1918. He
recovered rapidly from the operation, but a month later he
fell ill, partially paralyzed and unable to speak. In June
he made a partial recovery and threw himself into the
formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the
federal system of reorganization he favoured against
Stalin’s unitary scheme. However, in December he was again
incapacitated by semiparalysis. Although no longer the
active leader of the state and party, he did muster the
strength to dictate several prescient articles and what is
called his political “Testament,” dictated to his secretary
between Dec. 23, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, in which he
expressed a great fear for the stability of the party under
the leadership of disparate, forceful personalities such as
Stalin and Trotsky. On March 10, 1923, another stroke
deprived him of speech. His political activity came to an
end. He suffered yet another stroke on the morning of Jan.
21, 1924, and died that evening in the village of Gorki (now
known as Gorki Leninskiye).
The last year of Lenin’s political life, when he fought
to eradicate abuses of his Socialist ideals and the
corruption of power, may well have been his greatest.
Whether the history of the Soviet Union would have been
fundamentally different had he survived beyond his 54th
birthday, no one can say with certainty.
Albert Resis
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