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Problems and Unproblems in Soviet Social Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Lewis S. Feuer
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Extract

The status of sociology and philosophy in the Soviet Union is radically different from that of the physical and mathematical sciences. The sociologists and philosophers are still regarded by the government as ideologists, whereas the mathematicians and physicists are considered scientists; and the ideologist is in low repute in the Soviet intellectual community. Thirty years ago, Nikolai Bukharin observed in a remarkable essay that the cultural style of the current Soviet period would be technicism, and that the humanities and historical sciences would be relegated to the background. He believed that this “one-sidedness“ was founded on the economic requirements of the time. Probably, however, the hollowness in the life of the Soviet ideologist is equally responsible for his low estate. The sociologists and philosophers are not regarded as independent thinkers; their job as ideological workers is to provide a documentation and footnoted commentary on the decisions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Young men of ability consequently tend to avoid choosing a life work in the social sciences and philosophy. Why, they say, should they sacrifice their intellectual independence at the outset of their lives?

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 117 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 Bukharin, N., Culture in Two Worlds (New York, 1934), pp. 18–19 Google Scholar.

2 The phrase “end of ideology” has had a curious history. It became well known through the book of Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, which followed in the footsteps of Raymond Aron's “the end of the ideological age” in his The Opium of the Intellectuals. Seymour M. Lipset in a forthcoming essay, “The Changing Class Structure and European Politics,” has tried to trace the origin of the phrase through a series of contemporary writers to Raymond Aron. Actually, however, both the concept and expression “an end to all ideology” were used by Friedrich Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Marx, cf. Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Feuer, Lewis S., New York, 1959, p. 238)Google Scholar. The notion followed directly from Engels’ conception of ideology as a thought process in which the thinker was unconscious of the real, impelling, underlying motive forces. The current usage of the “end of ideology” might be described as an unconscious movement of “Back to Engels.“ American writers, however, look to the end of Marxism itself as a form of ideology, while Marxists use it to forecast the end of bourgeois political theory. Among young Soviet philosophers, Engels’ phrase suggests a notion of philosophy as the critique of ideology, a notion which I once developed in several articles in Science and Society twenty years ago.

3 Marx and Engels on Malthus, trans. Dorothea L. Meek and Ronald L. Meek (London, 1953), pp. 108-9.