This is a book about how to write the history of philosophy. That sounds like a narrow subject and in Moscow in the 1970s it was not narrow at all, because the history of philosophy was one of the few places in Soviet intellectual life where genuine scholarship was still possible. The reason was simple and slightly shameful: the material was dead and foreign. Kant had no faction. Fichte could not be rehabilitated or unrehabilitated. A Soviet philosopher who wanted to think in public about method, evidence, development and the relation of a doctrine to its age could do it on German idealism, and could not do it on anything nearer home. This volume is the record of a serious mind working inside that permission. It is worth asking what the permission was worth, and what it cost.
A word on the name first, since the catalogue is inconsistent. "Theodore Oizerman" on this spine and "T. I. Oizerman" on The Main Trends in Philosophy are the same man: Teodor Ilyich Oizerman (1914–2017), a front-line veteran of the war, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences and eventually a full Academician. Two of his other books are in this series, and this one is best read alongside them: The Making of the Marxist Philosophy (Progress, 1981) and The Main Trends in Philosophy (Progress, 1988). He himself names two more of his monographs in his opening pages, Problems of the History of Philosophy (Moscow 1969, English 1973) and Major Trends in Philosophy (Moscow 1971), and says the present book is meant to supplement them.
The spine says 1982 and the text is older. There is no copyright line for the Russian original in the file, so the dating has to be done from the inside, and the inside is unusually decisive.
The book's one and only political citation is to Leonid Brezhnev, and the bibliography sources it to Documents and Resolutions. XXVth Congress of the CPSU, published in 1976. The Twenty-Sixth Congress met in February 1981. A Soviet philosophy book going to press in 1981 or 1982 quotes the newest Congress; that is what the citation is for. This one does not know about it. The most recent item anywhere in the bibliography is from 1977. The latest date mentioned in the text is a German translation of his own earlier book published in 1979, which the author records as already out. Put those three facts together and the Russian text was finished around 1979 and certainly before February 1981. What you are holding is a book of the late Brezhnev years — the stagnation at its deepest, four years before Gorbachev — dressed in a 1982 jacket.
That matters for what follows, because the excuses available to a 1988 book are not available here. Nothing was loosening. Nothing was about to.
Unlike its two companions in this series, this volume is not a reprint of an older book wearing a new date. There is no earlier-edition statement and no printing history in the front matter, and Oizerman presents it as a fresh collection written to supplement his 1969 and 1971 monographs. The lag here is a translation lag of about three years, not the nineteen-year lag of The Making of the Marxist Philosophy.
Two corrections to the companion volumes, offered in the open because the series ought to hold itself to the standard it applies to Progress. First: the introduction to The Main Trends in Philosophy dates that text "firmly to the second half of the 1980s" and concludes that it "cannot predate 1986" — right as far as it goes, since the 1988 book does cite the 1986 Party Programme and a 1986 Progress volume of the Collected Works. But it has no ancestor in that account, and it has one. In the opening pages of the book you are now holding, Oizerman lists his own monographs and names Major Trends in Philosophy (Moscow, 1971); the Russian title on the 1988 copyright page is the same. The 1988 English is a revised edition of a book first published in Russian in 1971. That does not overturn the earlier judgement; it sharpens it. When that piece observed that the 1988 volume "took no liberty a 1978 book could not have taken", the reason was that its core was a book of 1971.
Second, and more substantially: that introduction reads the absence of any Soviet philosophical history from the 1988 book as a choice made in 1988, "when the archives were opening", and calls omission "the more conspicuous choice of the two" at that date. The evidence from the other two volumes will not support the timing. The same omission runs through the 1962 first edition of The Making of the Marxist Philosophy, through its mid-1970s revision, and through this book of 1979. It is not a glasnost-era decision; it is a habit of forty years. That makes the silence a larger finding and a smaller accusation — less a calculation about what 1988 would tolerate, more the settled reflex of a man who had never in his working life written a sentence about where he was standing.
The first section, "Problems of Method in the History of Philosophy", contains the best thing in the book: a long, close and technically competent engagement with a school of French and Italian metaphilosophy that most English-speaking readers have never heard of. Martial Gueroult is Oizerman's principal opponent, cited thirty-four times, and Oizerman identifies the school accurately — "Gueroult's supporters and followers include Henri Gouhier, Paul Ricoeur, F. Brunner, Franco Lombard! and V. Goldschmidt," the last two names damaged in scanning, Franco Lombardi and Victor Goldschmidt. He has read them in French. He quotes Fernand Brunner's demand that "the object of a historical study must remain an object, and that quality is guaranteed by the impartiality of the historian," and Brunner quoting the nineteenth-century historian Edmond Scherer: "To understand a philosophy we must be alien to it and able, as it were, to regard it from the outside." He reports their charges against Hegel fairly before answering them — Gueroult's line that Hegel's history of philosophy "abolishes the fact it claims to substantiate", Brunner's that it is a "despotic solution of the issue of philosophical diversity", Goldschmidt's that it is imperialist. He then makes the observation that gives him his opening: the phrase "philosophy of the history of philosophy" was Hegel's own, and the school that has adopted it never says so, because their doctrine is the reverse of his.
That is real scholarship, done from primary sources, on a debate that was live in Paris and not in Moscow. It is also, quietly, an act of nerve. The whole argument depends on treating a set of contemporary bourgeois professors as people with a position worth reconstructing at length.
The chapters on the idealists are better still, and they are not what a reader coming to a Soviet philosophy book expects. Oizerman does not convict Hegel. He rescues him, at length and with obvious pleasure. He quotes Herzen — "Hegelian philosophy," the Russian revolutionary said, "is the algebra of revolution, it emancipates man, exceptionally and completely destroys the Christian world, the world of myths that have outlived themselves" — and then argues the case himself. He notices what Hegel found interesting: "Above all he is interested in the living, in what has come and will pass; it is ever emerging, and Hegel describes this state as unrest." He quotes Hegel on contradiction as the condition of life — "Something is therefore vital only if it contains a contradiction, and it is precisely the power which is capable of containing and withstanding it" — and on truth: "Truth," says Hegel, "is a noble word and a still nobler cause." He credits Hegel with destroying the metaphysical concept of immutable truth, and against those "of our contemporaries who believe that no social transformations are capable of overcoming the inevitable disharmony of human existence" he sets Hegel's flat line: "Should an idea be too good to exist, it is the fault of the ideal itself."
The Kant is careful and the Fichte is better than careful — a 175-mention treatment of a philosopher who was, and largely remains, underserved in English. The essay "Philosophy and Everyday Consciousness" is the most original piece in the collection and the least doctrinal: an argument that the standard philosophical contempt for ordinary belief misses the "necessary organic connection" between the two, illustrated with proverbs, with what people take for granted about interest on savings, and with Marx's demonstration that vulgar political economy is everyday bourgeois consciousness raised to the dignity of theory.
The engagement with living Western philosophy is by name and from the texts: Jean Hyppolite's Essays on Marx and Hegel quoted directly, Karl Löwith, Erwin Metzke, Jacques D'Hondt cited approvingly, Lev Shestov quoted at length on Kant and treated as worth answering. Even the concession to the enemy is there, borrowed from P. N. Fedoseyev and endorsed: "some bourgeois philosophers work fruitfully in the field of formal logic, developing semiotics (including semantics and pragmatics). It would be unfair to disregard their achievements in that field; one should carefully examine all that is valuable here."
Anyone told that Soviet philosophy was uniformly worthless will learn nothing from that description, and it is not true. This book is evidence against it.
Now the other side. The methodological argument of the book turns on partiinost' — party-mindedness, rendered throughout as "partisanship" — and Oizerman states it more baldly here than in the 1988 volume.
The argument as such is defensible and parts of it are true. Brunner and Scherer want the historian to stand outside all philosophies; Oizerman replies that there is no outside, that the claim to occupy one is itself a philosophical position, and that a historian of philosophy is inevitably a philosopher. "Partisanship in science — and in philosophy — is not a personal but a social position and must naturally be free from any subjective preferences." From which: "The much-vaunted nonpartisanship is, not surprisingly, revealed as pseudo-nonpartisanship — in other words, disguised bourgeois partisanship." As a sociology of knowledge that is arguable and has been argued, in that form, by people with no state behind them at all.
But look what the argument is resting on. A page earlier, at the hinge of the case, Oizerman produces his authority: "According to Leonid Brezhnev, 'There is no room for neutralism or compromise in the struggle between the two ideologies.'"
That is the whole problem in one line, and it is worse than the 1988 book's closing quotation from the Party Programme, which at least came after the argument was over. Here the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is a step in an epistemological proof about how to write the history of philosophy. The methodological objection to Gueroult is settled by a man who had never read Gueroult. Oizerman does not notice; the sentence is set down in the same register as the quotations from Engels and Lenin, as though it were the same kind of thing.
The house sweep for this series turns up, in 99,288 words: Deborin — nil. Zhdanov — nil. Alexandrov — nil. Yudin — nil. Stalin — nil. Lysenko, Bukharin, Trotsky, Plekhanov — nil, nil, nil, nil. "Menshevising idealism" — nil. Pod znamenem marksizma — nil. The years 1931 and 1947 — nil and nil. The Soviet Union is named twice in the entire volume: once in a single clause noting that "The victory of socialism radically changed everyday consciousness," and once in the publisher's address on the last page.
The 1947 absence is the one that counts, because of what 1947 was. In June of that year Andrei Zhdanov intervened personally in a philosophical conference in Moscow, and the occasion of the intervention was a book on the history of philosophy: G. F. Alexandrov's history of Western European philosophy. Alexandrov ran the Central Committee's agitation and propaganda apparatus — he was one of the people who had conducted the purge of the intelligentsia — and the charge against him was that he had been too respectful of the West. Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain, reported it in Fourth International in December 1949: Alexandrov was "severely taken to task for having shown a servile adulation toward Western European thought" in his book on the history of philosophy. The year before, Raya Dunayevskaya had noted in the same journal that "no Soviet philosopher missed the significance of Zhdanov's appearance at their conference in June 1947."
That is the founding event of the discipline this book belongs to. It is the reason a Soviet historian of Western philosophy in 1979 knew exactly how much respect he could pay Kant, and knew that the limit was not a scholarly question. And the offence for which Alexandrov was destroyed is, in substance, the thing this book does on almost every page: read Western idealists closely, quote them at length, credit them with insight. Oizerman had travelled a long way from 1947 and the distance is to his credit. He will not say who cleared the road, or what it cost, or that there was a road.
Then there is the shape of the silence, which is more revealing than its extent. The book cites thirteen living or recently living Soviet philosophers, and every single one of them is right. Fedoseyev "is perfectly justified"; Konstantinov "rightly observes"; Kedrov "stresses quite rightly"; L. F. Ilyichev "aptly remarks"; M. A. Kissel "is right to say"; V. F. Asmus "is right", twice, and "aptly remarks" once more; V. I. Shinkaruk "observes"; Ilyenkov "is right to say"; Bogomolov "has substantially and scientifically analyzed" his subject. There is not one Soviet philosopher in this book with whom Oizerman records a disagreement.
The people in that list did not have interchangeable histories. E. V. Ilyenkov was the most creative Soviet philosopher of his generation and spent his career under institutional pressure; he died by his own hand in 1979, about when this manuscript was being finished. B. M. Kedrov was removed from the editorship of Voprosy filosofii in 1949 in the campaign against "cosmopolitanism". And M. B. Mitin — quoted here on Hegel, at length, respectfully, as "the Soviet philosopher M. B. Mitin" — was one of the young men who in 1930–31 denounced Deborin's school as "Menshevising idealism", helped to break the philosophical establishment on the Party's behalf and inherited what was left of it. In this book Mitin and Ilyenkov are the same kind of object: an authority, correctly cited, in agreement.
Read across the three Oizerman volumes in this series, that pairing turns into a sequence. In The Making of the Marxist Philosophy, whose Russian first edition is of 1962 and whose revision dates from the mid-1970s, Mitin is cited approvingly and Deborin does not appear at all. Here in 1979 the position is identical: Mitin present as an authority, Deborin absent — nil occurrences in 99,288 words. Only in The Main Trends in Philosophy, translated in 1988, does Deborin finally appear, and then as an ordinary source on Leibniz, a footnote away from Mitin, with nothing between them. Across twenty-six years and three books, the accuser is continuously citable and the accused becomes citable last and silently. That is not one author's oversight. It is the shape of a rehabilitation conducted without an admission.
The same volume shows the harder case. The Making of the Marxist Philosophy cites David Ryazanov seven times as a scholarly authority — the founder of the Marx-Engels Institute, the man who first put the 1844 Manuscripts into print — and twice disagrees with him courteously, without a word about his removal in 1931 or his execution in 1938. The present book does not cite Ryazanov at all, so it commits the smaller version of the offence: it does not use him. A discipline that can quote a shot man on Leibniz and not say he was shot has made a settlement with itself, and the settlement is the discipline.
And when Oizerman does disagree with a Marxist, the disagreement goes into the passive voice with the name removed. Twice, exactly twice. "Some authors, even Marxists, are often mistaken in their interpretation of Hegel's critique of formal logic." And, more remarkably: "it would be an obvious departure from the principle of historicism (and from its concomitant, the principle of the partisanship of philosophy) to assert — as it is sometimes done — that the history of philosophy is the history of dialectical and historical materialism."
That second sentence is the most interesting thing Oizerman writes. The formula he is rejecting — that the history of philosophy just is the history of dialectical and historical materialism — is not a stray error by an anonymous colleague. It is the doctrine the discipline was reorganised around after 1947, the standard against which Alexandrov's book was condemned for finding too much in Kant and Hegel. George Novack described it from outside in 1973 as the reduction of the subject to "a straight and narrow road of materialist development" running from the Milesians "to the mastermind in the Kremlin". Oizerman is repudiating that settlement, in print, in a book whose whole purpose is to argue that the idealists are worth reading. He simply will not say whose formula it is. He attributes it to nobody, dates it to no year, and moves on in the next clause. The argument is made and the history that produced it is deleted.
That is the price of the licence, and it is exact. He was allowed to be a scholar about Hegel on condition that he was not a historian about Moscow. He kept the bargain, and the bargain hollowed out the book's own thesis — because a man arguing that philosophy is always the philosophy of a social position, and that nobody stands outside, has written close to three hundred pages that never once locate the author's own position, or the position of anyone he cites, in the Soviet Union.
Nobody in the anti-Stalinist tradition ever reviewed Oizerman; a search of the English Biulleten' Oppozitsii, the ETOL run of Fourth International 1940–1956, the collected English Trotsky, all 763 Intercontinental Press issue PDFs from 1968 to 1986 and the International Viewpoint archive returns his name nowhere. But the argument of this book was answered, in print, by name and in detail, three years before he finished writing it.
On 29 March 1976 Intercontinental Press published "Freedom for Philosophy: On the Right to Think Without Reprisals or Constraint", by George Novack, running five pages. It is the reply, and it is close enough to be uncanny.
Novack begins by conceding Oizerman's premise. Not grudgingly — flatly, as a Marxist commonplace: "there is no shade of philosophy without class bias and political implications and effects." He grants the next step too: "It is perfectly in order for a Marxist party or a government guided by such a party to propagate the doctrines and method of dialectical materialism openly and consistently along with its program and proposals," and adds that it is obliged to. Everything Oizerman argues against Brunner and Gueroult, Novack has already agreed to. Then he draws the line Oizerman never draws: "But that is entirely different from adopting a state philosophy and then compelling everyone from the scholars and teachers in the universities to schoolchildren to pay obeisance to that viewpoint. That is as bad as enforcing a state religion."
What follows is a description of the consequences, and it reads as a diagnosis of the book you are holding. "A philosophic standpoint or system that is imposed by official compulsion upon the minds of a people takes on the traits of a religion: blind faith, hypocrisy, discrepancy between theory and practice, dogmatism, and the withering of critical thought." And then the sentence that explains the citation apparatus, the thirteen unanimous colleagues and the two nameless dissenters: "When it encounters no strong and serious open challenges to its positions and formulas, official thought grows dull, slothful, and unsure of itself." Against it he sets the standard: "A living and effective philosophy must earn and win conviction by the force of its arguments rather than by arguments of force."
Novack was not speculating from a distance. The 1976 article surveys the actual state of the field: Kolakowski stripped of his Warsaw chair, Adam Schaff expelled from the Polish Central Committee in 1968, Karel Kosík removed from the philosophy faculty at Charles University after 1969 and writing to Sartre that he felt "buried alive", the eight Praxis professors dismissed by the Serbian legislature in 1975. He is careful about the USSR specifically, and his verdict is neither triumphal nor dismissive: "In the past fifteen years, some of this burden has been lightened, though far from being lifted," and yet "Soviet philosophers are far from enjoying freedom of expression even within the framework of the Marxist world outlook." That last clause is exactly the condition of this book — free within the framework, and the framework is the problem.
The direct hit on 1947 is in an earlier Novack piece, "Facts Are Stubborn Things", in Intercontinental Press of 23 July 1973. There he writes that Stalin's "Red Professors" screened out of the history of philosophy the contributions that did not conform to official criteria, and then: "In 1947, at Stalin's behest, his watchdog on the cultural front, Zhdanov, indicted the History of West European Philosophy by the unlucky G.F. Alexandrov, who saw something good in the works of Kant, Hegel and Fourier." Seeing something good in the works of Kant and Hegel is, more or less exactly, what Oizerman spends 99,288 words doing. That is why the missing year matters. The reader is entitled to know that the thing being done in front of him had once been a punishable offence, and this book will not say so. (Ernest Mandel had reported the same episode from Europe in 1949, in Fourth International: Alexandrov taken to task for "servile adulation toward Western European thought".)
Behind both articles stands Novack's own history of philosophy. In 1942, while the Socialist Workers Party was being prosecuted under the Smith Act, he gave nine lectures, published in revised form as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., Pathfinder, 1971), running from Aristotle through Hegel to Marx — the same arc as this book and many of the same protagonists. On the philosophy proper the comparison does not embarrass Oizerman; he is much the better-read man, and Novack is a lecturer working largely from Engels. But the two defend Hegel against the same charge. Novack is answering Burnham, who called Hegel "the century-dead arch-muddler of human thought", and Dewey, who told Novack to his face that in logic Hegel was a "dead dog"; Oizerman is answering Hyppolite, Löwith and Metzke. Lecture VII states Oizerman's own conclusion three decades early: "Those critics who identify Marxism with Hegelianism not only lack dialectics; they even violate the rules of formal logic."
The difference is that Novack's history has room in it for what happens to philosophers. His first lecture opens on the professors who "invoked the traditional authority of Aristotle and finally the power of the Index and the Inquisition against Galileo to force him to recant his views" — "These servants of official authority sought to silence the arguments, ban the books, terrorise and even kill their scientific opponents." His third holds that "formal logic goes hand in hand with religion and dogmatism". These are not ornaments; they are load-bearing, and they are why 1947 can be named without changing register. Oizerman's method has no such place, and so nothing goes there.
Novack in Lecture IV writes that "Academicians have tried to tame Hegel, to emasculate and mutilate his thought, to transform him into a harmless icon, as they do with all dead revolutionists, including Marx." He meant American professors. Oizerman was, by title, an Academician, and he did not tame Hegel; the Hegel chapters here are alive. What he tamed was the history he was standing in.
As a book about German idealism, this is honest work by a real scholar, and the Hegel and Fichte chapters will repay a reader who has no interest whatever in the Soviet Union. As a book about method it is self-refuting in an instructive way, and the instruction is available to anyone who reads the partiinost' argument and the Brezhnev citation on consecutive pages. As a document, it is a precise measurement of how much intellectual freedom the late Brezhnev years extended to a first-rate mind, and of exactly where the wall stood.
Oizerman quotes Kant, approvingly, on what an age owes itself: "Our age is truly an age of critique to which everything must bow. Religion, because of its holiness, and law, because of its greatness, want to be outside the realm of that critique. But in that case they understandably rouse suspicion and can no longer count on the genuine respect with which reason treats only something that can withstand its free and open trial."
He printed that in Moscow in 1979 and applied it to the Church and to Prussian law. There was another institution that wanted to be outside the realm of the critique, and it is the one that published him.