Main currents of Marxism : the founders, the golden age, the breakdown
"Drawing on powerful historical and philosophical insight, Main Currents of Marxism traces the intellectual foundations of Marxist thought from Plotinus through Hegel to Lukacs, Sartre, and Mao. Leszek Kolakowski reveals Marxism to be "the greatest fantasy of our century ... an idea that began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism." Long before the overwhelming majority of historians, journalists, and intellectuals around the world came to see the devastation wrought by autocratic, state-sponsored socialism, Kolakowski pointed to the shortcomings of a system doomed to failure." "Recognized when it was first published for its profound historical insights and for its exposition of how the Communist hierarchy was quickly corroding from the inside, this forceful work has influenced several generations of scholars and historians. Despite decades of major political change, Main Currents of Marxism remains as accurate and incisive as ever. In a new preface and epilogue, Kolakowski reexamines the collapse of international Communism in light of the last tumultuous years."--Jacket
History
xxiv, 1284 pages ; 25 cm
9780393060546, 9780393329438, 0393060543, 0393329437
61169688
v. 1. The founders
v. 2. The golden age
v. 3. The breakdown. Preface to the 1981 edition
BOOK ONE: THE FOUNDERS: The origin of the dialectic
The Hegelian left
Marx's thought in its earliest phase
Hess and Feuerbach
Marx's early political and philosophical writings
The Paris Manuscripts. The theory of alienated labour. The young Engels
The Holy family
The German ideology
Recapitulation
Socialist ideas in the first half of the Nineteenth Century as compared with Marxian socialism
The writings and struggles of Marx and Engels after 1847
Capitalism as a dehumanized world
The contradictions of capital and their abolition. The unity of analysis and action
The motive forces of the historical process
The dialectic of nature
Recapitulation and philosophical commentary
Selected bibliography. BOOK TWO: THE GOLDEN AGE: Marxism and the Second International
German orthodoxy: Karl Kautsky
Rosa Luxemburg and the Revolutionary Left
Bernstein and revisionism
Jean Jaures: Marxism as a soteriology
Paul Lafargue: a Hedonist Marxism
Georges Sorel: a Jansenist Marxism
Antonio Labriola: an attempt at an open orthodoxy
Ludwik Krzywicki: Marxism as an instrument of sociology
Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz: a Polish brand of orthodoxy
Stanislaw Brzozowski: Marxism as a Historical Subjectivism
Austro-Marxists, Kantians in the Marxist movement. Ethical socialism
The beginnings of Russian Marxism
Plekhanov and the codification of Marxism
Marxism in Russia before the rise of Bolshevism
The rise of Leninism
Philosophy and politics in the Bolshevik movement
The fortunes of Leninism: from a theory of the state to a state ideology
Selective bibliography. BOOK THREE: THE BREAKDOWN: The first phase of Soviet Marxism. The beginnings of Stalinism
Theoretical controversies in Soviet Marxism in the 1920s
Marxism as an ideology of the Soviet State
The crystallization of Marxism-Leninism after the Second World War
Trotsky
Antonio Gramsci: Communist Revisionism
Gyorgy Lukacs: reason in the service of dogma
Karl Korsch
Lucien Goldman
The Frankfurt School and 'Critical Theory'
Herbert Marcuse: Marxism as a totalitarian utopia of the New Left
Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a futuristic gnosis
Developments in Marxism after Stalin's death
Epilogue
New epilogue
Selective bibliography
Originally published: Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1978
Translation of: Glówne nurty marksizmu