A. S. Bogomolov's History of Ancient Philosophy: Greece and Rome is a university textbook, and it announces as much on its first working page: "This book is primarily intended for students of the humanities, but will also be found helpful in self-education." Progress Publishers issued it in English in 1985, translated from a Russian original of the same period, and unlike many titles in this series it carries no hidden earlier date — no lag between a manuscript closed in one decade and a jacket printed in another. This is late-Soviet academic philosophy caught almost in real time: a survey of the Greeks and Romans, from Thales to the closing of the Athenian Academy in 529, written for the last cohort of Soviet students before perestroika reached the philosophy faculties. Bogomolov was a genuine scholar — a professor at Moscow State University who spent a career on ancient thought, on Hegel, and on the currents of twentieth-century Western philosophy — and the book shows it on nearly every page. It also shows, from its opening paragraphs onward, the frame he was obliged to build it around, and the interest of the volume lies almost entirely in the friction between the two.
What the book was for shapes what it is. A textbook of the history of philosophy is not a foreign-policy tract or a piece of legitimation for a Party congress; its job is to carry a body of difficult material to students and to the self-taught, and it is judged, first, on whether the exposition is any good. Bogomolov's is. One measure worth stating up front, because it inverts a pattern common in this series: where many Soviet books on Western thought reach their subjects at second hand, through Soviet intermediaries and approved summaries, Bogomolov reads the Greeks in the Greek sources. He works from the fragments and the ancient doxographers — the compilers such as Diogenes Laertius and the commentators who preserved what the originals lost — and from the modern critical editions, weighing the evidence rather than relaying a verdict. The apparatus is a working scholar's, not a propagandist's. That is the ground on which the volume earns its keep, and it is also what makes the doctrinal frame chafe so visibly: a mind this well furnished with the actual texts is forever noticing things the schema has no room for.
The frame is stated without apology. The history of philosophy, the Publishers' Note explains, illustrates "the inevitability of the split of all philosophers in a class society into two big camps." The whole of the two-and-a-half-thousand-year story is to be read as a single sustained conflict between materialism and idealism — and, more than that, as a conflict with sides, a fight in which the historian is expected to enlist. Bogomolov gives the doctrine its canonical pedigree at once, quoting Lenin's challenge from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908): "Could the struggle between materialism and idealism, the struggle between the tendencies or lines of Plato and Democritus in philosophy ... have become antiquated during the two thousand years of the development of philosophy?" That sentence is the master key of the book. The entire history of ancient thought is recast as the opening act of a struggle between the line of Democritus and the line of Plato — a struggle that, on this account, is still being fought, and whose latest chapter is the reader's own present. Bogomolov spells out the pairing in his own voice at the head of the classical period: "the materialist line ... represented by Democritus" against "the idealistic line ... represented by Plato." Two men, two teams, and a game whose winner is already known.
The division itself is the one Engels drew, and Bogomolov quotes him for it: the answer each philosopher gives to "the great basic question of philosophy," the relation of thinking to being, "split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism." So far this is ordinary Marxism, and it is not, in itself, an unreasonable way to sort philosophers. What turns a distinction into a doctrine is the next step, and Bogomolov takes it explicitly. The method of the history of philosophy, he writes, calls not only for historical accuracy but "for partisanship which demands of a historian of philosophy to occupy a clear-cut social and philosophical position in assessing every phenomenon under investigation in the light of struggle between materialism and idealism." The word carrying the weight there is partisanship — in the Russian, partiinost' (party-mindedness), the demand that scholarship take the party's side. It is not a Bogomolov coinage. It is the principle that Andrei Zhdanov made compulsory for Soviet philosophy in the celebrated "philosophical discussion" of 1947, when the Party publicly rebuked G. F. Alexandrov's History of Western European Philosophy for treating past thinkers with too even a hand and too little combat. From that point the history of philosophy in the USSR had a required form: the militant struggle of materialism against idealism, narrated by a historian who has already chosen his side. Bogomolov, four decades later, opens his book by restating the rule as method.
What the rule does to the actual history is worth watching closely, because the flattening is precise and it is visible in the text. Plato — the greatest of the idealists, and a thinker Bogomolov plainly loves — is processed into a class-symptom. His philosophy, we read, "represented an immediate ideological reaction to the atomistic doctrine of Democritus"; his system was "reactionary as it was"; his ideal Republic makes him not a precursor of socialism (a reading the book is anxious to refuse) but "the ideologist of such feudal organisations as monastic societies and knightly fraternities." Idealism, on this schema, does not have reasons; it has causes. It arises when a declining class needs a consoling picture of the world, and its content is decoded as the reflex of that need. The materialists, meanwhile, are graded on a single scale — their distance from dialectical materialism, the doctrine that is assumed to complete the line they began. Democritus is praised for consistency; Epicurus is credited with an advance; the whole ancient materialist tradition is read forward, as an approach toward a destination it could not have known.
This is where the frame turns on itself, and the problem is not a Trotskyist objection smuggled in from outside — it is a problem the book's own method generates. If every philosophy is to be judged by the class whose interests it served, and graded by its service to a "line," then the obvious question is what happens when the method is turned on the philosophy doing the judging. Soviet Marxism-Leninism was the official doctrine of a particular state, taught by its universities, published by its ministries, and policed by its Central Committee. It had, on its own account of how ideas work, a social base and a class function as surely as Plato's idealism did. Yet the one philosophy the book never treats as a class-bound ideology is its own. Dialectical materialism is not offered as one more position in the struggle it describes; it is the vantage point from which the struggle is scored, the true philosophy from which all the others are ranked. That exemption is the tell. A method that can explain every world-view as the ideology of a class, and then quietly excuses itself from the explanation, is not a science of philosophy but a philosophy that has declared itself the end of the story. Ask of the book the simple reflexive question — could the category "class-bound ideology" ever be applied to the author's own standpoint? — and the answer is no, and cannot be otherwise. The category only ever points outward.
The sharpest reply to this is not a heresy but the tradition's own founding texts, several of which Bogomolov cites while missing what they were doing. Take the young Marx, whom the book invokes with real warmth. Marx's doctoral dissertation of 1841, on the difference between the natural philosophy of Democritus and that of Epicurus, is one of the sources Bogomolov leans on for his chapters on atomism — and rightly, because it is a small masterpiece. But its whole point cuts against the two-camps grid. Marx did not sort the ancient materialists into a single "line"; he found a drama inside materialism itself. Democritus and Epicurus taught almost the same physics, and yet, Marx argued, they were opposites in spirit: where Democritus made the atom's fall a matter of rigid necessity, Epicurus introduced the tiny, spontaneous swerve (the clinamen), the atom's unpredictable declination from the straight line — and in that swerve Marx read the germ of freedom, of self-consciousness breaking the chain of mechanical cause. Bogomolov knows the passage; he quotes Marx that the declination "is ... not a particular determination which appears accidentally in Epicurean physics. On the contrary, the law which it expresses goes through the whole Epicurean philosophy," and he generously credits Marx as the first to see it. What he cannot absorb is the lesson of the method: that "materialism" is not a team to be cheered but a field of real, unresolved differences, and that the interesting history runs within the camp, not merely between the camps. Marx read the ancients as a philosopher arguing with them. Bogomolov's schema can only read them as troops in a line of battle.
The same young Marx supplies a second corrective the book quotes without quite hearing. Bogomolov defends the long Greco-Roman period — the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics that older handbooks dismissed as the "decline" of ancient thought — by citing Marx's own doctoral theses, in which the future author of Capital wrote that the "post-Aristotelean" schools, "and primarily the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic schools, are more significant and interesting for the subjective form, the character of Greek philosophy," precisely the dimension that had "until now been almost entirely ignored." It is a fine, humane point, and Bogomolov is right to lean on it. But notice what Marx is praising: the subjective form, the inner life and temper of these philosophies, the thing a two-camps ledger of "materialist" and "idealist" entries cannot record at all. The touchstone the book reaches for keeps handing it a richer method than the one it is committed to.
Engels, from whom the "two great camps" sentence is taken, is subtler than the use made of him. The passage comes from Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), and in that same essay Engels is careful to confine the division to one question only — the primacy of thought or being — and warns against inflating "idealism" and "materialism" into general terms of praise and abuse. More tellingly, the essay's hero is Hegel, an idealist, whom Engels honours as the thinker who carried the dialectic to its highest pre-Marxist form. The founder of the "two camps" formula did not think that being an idealist disqualified a philosopher from being the greatest dialectician of the age. The schema built on Engels' authority forgets the very generosity that made his own history of philosophy worth reading.
And then there is Lenin — the decisive case, because it is his name the whole edifice rests on. The two-camps history is quarried almost entirely from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a polemic Lenin wrote in 1908 in the heat of a factional fight, its purpose to club a group of Bolshevik philosophers back into line. It is his least dialectical book, and he knew it. Six years later, filling his notebooks with a close reading of Hegel's Logic — the private working papers published long after as the Philosophical Notebooks — Lenin wrote in something like the opposite spirit. There he insisted that "intelligent idealism" stands closer to "intelligent materialism" than crude, mechanical materialism does; that idealism is not simply priestcraft and reaction but a one-sided, exaggerated development of a genuine moment of knowledge — a "sterile flower," in his image, that nonetheless grows on the living tree of human cognition. The Lenin of the Notebooks would have found the flat sorting of Plato into the reactionary bin a piece of the "stupid materialism" he despised. The Zhdanovite history of two camps was built on Lenin's name but on his narrowest book, and it dropped the dialectician for the polemicist. This matters for the volume in hand because Bogomolov's own best pages, as we will see, are written in the key of the Notebooks, not of the 1908 polemic — and he seems not to have noticed the tension.
The anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition made this criticism directly, and it is worth hearing in its own voice, though with an honest caveat: the Fourth International's press did not review a Soviet Greek philosophy textbook of 1985, and the reply gathered here is one of principle, made decades earlier against the same operation, not a contemporaneous encounter. In December 1940 the American Marxist George Novack, reviewing Engels' Dialectics of Nature — which the Stalinist state had just published — put the point exactly. "The Stalinists might preserve some relics of past Marxist thought," he wrote, "as the medieval schoolmen preserved the writings of Aristotle or as they themselves mummified Lenin's body: to exhibit the decaying glories of the past while violating their spirit in the present." That is the charge in a sentence. The living dialectic — the method that reads an opponent for what is true in him, that finds the struggle inside each position and not only between the labelled camps — is embalmed into a catechism of two lines, and the embalming is performed in Lenin's name. A history of philosophy conducted as partiinost' keeps the vocabulary of the tradition while losing the thing the vocabulary was for.
None of this is a reason to put the book down, and a reader told that its frame is compromised has been told the least interesting thing about it. Bogomolov was a real historian of philosophy, and the scholarship is frequently first-rate — often precisely where it strains hardest against the schema it is required to serve. Three things deserve concrete credit.
First, his treatment of the earliest Greeks. Bogomolov refuses the lazy convention that files the thinkers before Socrates as a mere warm-up. He objects to the very word "Pre-Socratic" as a nineteenth-century coinage that makes a great age of thought look "transitory, auxiliary and insignificant," and he restores Democritus in particular to the centre of the story, insisting that it was the atomist "who created a complete and consistent doctrine of atomistic materialism, a classical system which can well compare, in terms of maturity, with the systems of Plato and Aristotle." The command of the material behind that judgement is real: the book works directly from the ancient doxographers and the modern critical editions, weighs the fragments, reconstructs the arguments, and is never content to paraphrase a handbook. Whatever one makes of the "line of Democritus" as ideology, the chapters on early Greek natural philosophy are a serious piece of exposition.
Second, and best, the Aristotle. The long central chapter on Aristotle's physics and metaphysics is the finest thing in the volume, and it is finest exactly at the point where Bogomolov abandons the two-camps scoreboard for the patient tracking of a mind at work. His pages on entelechy — Aristotle's term for a thing's inner drive toward its own completion — and on the paired concepts of potentiality and actuality are lucid, sympathetic and philosophically alert; here, he writes, we see "the living germs of dialectics, this time in the concepts of matter and form, potentiality and actuality." Note the verdict he reaches on Aristotle's overall standing: "Aristotle wavers between idealism and materialism on a number of issues, but the idealist trend is generally prevalent." That "wavers" is an almost direct echo of the Philosophical Notebooks, where Lenin found Aristotle forever hesitating on the threshold between the camps — and it is the dialectical Lenin, not the polemicist of 1908, whom Bogomolov is following when his exposition is at its most illuminating. The great idealist is not decoded as reaction here; he is read as a thinker whose contradictions are productive. The book is at its best when the schema is quietest.
Third — and this is the volume's deepest and least intended interest — Bogomolov's scholarship keeps crediting idealists with achievements his own frame is supposed to file under reaction, and he keeps saying so out loud. Plato's system, "reactionary as it was," nonetheless "synthesised the dialectical achievements of previous Greek thought." Anaxagoras's idealism "stepped in to fill the gaps" in his materialism, which is a concession that idealism did explanatory work. Most striking of all is his account of Proclus, the last great pagan Neo-Platonist, whose doctrine of the One and the many Bogomolov describes as "profound and extremely fruitful" — a "dialectical idea" that "marked an important step forward in the development of idealist dialectics," and was then, in his phrase, "utterly emasculated" by the theological system built around it. Stop on that. A committed partisan of the materialist line has just told the reader, twice, that idealism developed the dialectic — that some of the most important advances in the history of dialectical thought were made by philosophers on the wrong side of the great divide. The historian in Bogomolov keeps overrunning the ideologist. He cannot help registering what the sources actually show, even when what they show is that the two lines are not two teams, that the "reactionary" thinkers built the tools the tradition would later claim, and that the real history is a single tangled growth rather than a two-thousand-year tug of war.
That tension — between the loyal frame and the honest scholarship that keeps breaking it — is the reason this book survives its own doctrine. Read as the official Soviet history of ancient philosophy, it is a period document, an example of partiinost' applied to the Greeks, and instructive chiefly as such. Read for its exposition of Democritus, its Aristotle, its careful handling of the Hellenistic schools and of Neo-Platonism, it is a capable and often admirable guide, made by a man who knew the material and, at his best, could not stop himself from doing it justice. The frame tells you that the history of philosophy is a battlefield with two armies and a foregone winner. The scholarship, again and again, quietly reports something more interesting: that the losers built half the weapons, that the winners borrowed them, and that the truth of a philosophy is not settled by the class it is assigned to. Where those two accounts collide, believe the second — and know that Bogomolov, the historian rather than the partisan, would very nearly have agreed.