Most books in this series were written to be believed. This one was written to be argued with, and that difference is worth stating at the outset, because it changes what a critical introduction can usefully do.
T. I. Oizerman's The Main Trends in Philosophy is a monograph in the history of philosophy by a man who spent his professional life doing history of philosophy. Its thesis is that the division of philosophy into materialism and idealism is not a classificatory convenience imposed by commentators but the real structural fact about the discipline, and that the "basic philosophical question" — whether nature or spirit is primary — is what generates that division. Around that thesis he builds a taxonomy of doctrines, schools, currents and trends; a long treatment of scepticism from Diogenes Laertius to the logical positivists; extended readings of Kant, Hegel, Spinoza and Leibniz; and a running polemic against Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Carnap, Russell, Popper and the Yugoslav praxis philosopher Gajo Petrović. The bibliography runs to 283 numbered items in four languages. Whatever else it is, it is a book, written by one person, with a case to make.
The spine says 1988, and for once in this series the spine is close to right. Progress translations routinely postdate their Russian originals by five or ten years — Kobelev's Ho Chi Minh carries 1989 over a 1983 Russian text — so the copyright page is never sufficient. Here the internal evidence dates the text firmly to the second half of the 1980s. Oizerman cites the Programme of the CPSU in its "New Edition" of 1986, the version adopted at the Twenty-Seventh Congress; he cites volume 28 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, published by Progress in 1986; and he refers the reader to his own Principles of the Theory of the Historical Process in Philosophy, written with A. S. Bogomolov and issued by Progress in the same year. The text cannot predate 1986.
But it reads as though it were finished before the thaw touched it. There is no Gorbachev in it, no perestroika, no glasnost, no "new thinking", not one of the words that were rewriting Soviet public language while the book was in production. Its most recent Soviet philosophical interlocutors are from 1983. A reader looking for the 1988 in this book will find it only in the Party Programme quotation, and that quotation is doing the opposite of loosening anything. So: a book of the mid-1980s, published at the end of them, which took no liberty a 1978 book could not have taken. That is a finding, and we return to it.
Oizerman himself (1914–2017) was not an apparatus functionary. He was at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences and a full Academician, and his scholarly reputation rested on genuine work: on Kant, on German classical philosophy, and above all on the formation of Marx's own thought, a subject on which he was among the better-informed people alive. He outlived the state by twenty-six years and used the time to revise, in print and in public, positions he had defended for decades — including the claim, central to this book, that the history of philosophy converges on dialectical materialism. That later revision is not a reason to discount the book. It is a reason to read it as the work of someone capable of changing his mind, which is not a description that fits most authors in this catalogue.
A great deal, and the series' credibility depends on saying so.
The opening move is a real one. "For philosophy," he writes, "is the sole field of knowledge in which agreement among its leading spokesmen is the exception rather than the rule." From this he draws a conclusion a textbook writer would avoid: that in philosophy, unlike in the special sciences, "one has to choose". A footnote in the introduction then quotes the physicist L. A. Artsimovich on why textbooks mislead — a textbook "may therefore sometimes weaken the reader's will for independent thinking by demonstrating the science to him as a collection of well preserved memorials of the past and not as a road to a future shrouded in fog" — and Oizerman applies the point explicitly to textbooks of philosophy. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, also in this series, is precisely such a collection of well-preserved memorials. Oizerman knew what he was distancing himself from.
The historical chapters are the work of a scholar. His Kant is read, not summarised. He credits Kant with an insight he says the eighteenth-century materialists lacked: Kant's inquiry into the origin of metaphysical ideas in reason "brought Kant close to awareness of the need to investigate the epistemological roots of religion and idealism, an awareness absent among the French materialists, who considered religion a product of ignorance and deceit, and did not ponder on what it reflected and why it was so deeply rooted in men's minds." That is a materialist docking an idealist's superiority over other materialists — a judgement no functionary would risk, and a correct one. He tracks the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason and the "Refutation of Idealism" Kant added to the second, and understands why Kant added it. On Hegel he is better still, and generous: Hegel's dialectical treatment of philosophical disagreement "played an immense role in moulding the science of the history of philosophy", and the fault Oizerman finds is a specific one — that Hegel "harmonised the process of the history of philosophy too much".
The engagement with living Western philosophy is by name, at length, and from the primary texts. He reads Popper in the Hutchinson Logic of Scientific Discovery and quotes him accurately: "A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice." His reconstruction of Husserl's epoché and of intentionality is competent and would not embarrass a lecture. He grants Sartre a footnote in which Sartre is "correctly stressing the humanitarian sense of the atheistic outlook". He quotes Camus on suicide as the one serious philosophical problem and takes the trouble to say the question "must not be underestimated" and to trace it back through Nietzsche.
Where the engagement fails, it fails as bad philosophy rather than as non-philosophy. His reply to Popper — that falsificationism is "a subjective principle of absolute relativism by which any description of facts ultimately proves to be a fallacy", rooted in irrationalism — is a misreading, and the sarcasm ("The poor Greek Sceptics!") is a tell that he is not comfortable. But he had read the book. That distinction matters, and the reader should hold onto it.
The book's last substantive section is "The Dialectical-Materialist Critique of Idealism. The Principle of the Partisanship of Philosophy" — partiinost', the doctrine that philosophy is unavoidably party philosophy.
The argument is more interesting than its reputation. Oizerman does not begin from authority; he begins from history. The eighteenth-century ideal of an above-party philosophy, he argues, was not hypocrisy but a real illusion with a real cause: "'Impartiality' meant, then, denial of feudal partiality." Against Marxism's critics he enlists Hegel, who ridiculed the demand that "the historian should proceed with impartiality" and distinguished partiality for justice from "subjective partiality" — a distinction Oizerman notes is "usually passed over in silence" so that partisanship can be presented as a Marxist invention. He is candid that partisanship can go wrong: "A contradiction between partisanship and scientific objectivity arises only when the scholar scorns the real needs of social development; in that case, however, he also betrays scientific objectivity." And he lands on Lenin's formulation, that "the non-party principle in bourgeois society is merely a hypocritical, disguised, passive expression of adherence to the party of the well-fed, of the rulers, of the exploiters" — hence, "impartiality is a bourgeois idea, partisanship a socialist one."
Note what this is. It is a sociology of philosophical knowledge, and as such it is arguable, and parts of it are simply true: the claim to stand nowhere is itself a position. What it is not, anywhere in these pages, is a claim that some institution is entitled to decide philosophical questions administratively. That claim never appears. It does not have to. Two paragraphs later the section closes with a long quotation from the 1986 Party Programme — "The Party considers it its most important duty to continue creatively developing Marxist-Leninist theory" — followed by Oizerman's own gloss that dialectical-materialist methodology is "the sole reliable instrument for cognising society and nature." An argument that partisanship is an epistemological virtue ends by producing a Party document as its warrant. The book does not notice the circle it has closed.
Now the finding, and it is a large one. This is a book about the history of philosophy, written in Moscow, that contains no history of philosophy in the Soviet Union.
There is no Lysenko in it. There is no Zhdanov, no 1947 philosophy conference, no Stalin, and no Dialectical and Historical Materialism. There is no 1931, no Central Committee resolution on Pod znamenem marksizma, and not one occurrence of the phrase "Menshevising idealism". A four-hundred-page argument that philosophy is a battlefield declines to describe the one battlefield its author stood on.
The silence has a shape. A. M. Deborin does appear — as a source. In a footnote on Leibniz and the community of property, Oizerman quotes him ("'Leibniz,' Deborin wrote in this connection, 'was convinced that community of property was the starting point of the development of humanity'") and endorses him: "This preaching of the community of property, as Deborin showed, quite obviously expressed the strength of his denial of feudal ownership." The reference is to Voprosy filosofii, 1961, no. 3. M. B. Mitin also appears — as a source, quoted approvingly on the relation of the ideal and the material, from Voprosy filosofii, 1962, no. 7.
Deborin headed the philosophical establishment and the journal Under the Banner of Marxism until January 1931, when a Party resolution condemned his school as "Menshevising idealism". Mitin was among the young philosophers who made the denunciation and inherited the institutions. Some of those swept up in that reorganisation and the years that followed did not survive them. Deborin did, and was rehabilitated enough by 1961 to publish the Leibniz essay Oizerman cites. Here the two men sit in the same apparatus of a single book, a year apart in the same journal, each a perfectly ordinary authority, with nothing between them at all.
Compare F. V. Konstantinov's Development of Revolutionary Theory by the CPSU, published by Progress in 1971 and also in this series. Konstantinov at least raises the subject, and the way he raises it is instructive: "But towards the beginning of the 1930s (in some cases even earlier) serious errors and distortions came to light in the work of the journal and in the school of A. M. Deborin, who headed the journal." Errors that came to light: no resolution, no agent, no consequence — a purge rendered as weather. Yet Konstantinov goes further than Oizerman ever does, conceding that "The personality cult damaged the development of Marxist theory and philosophy. It fettered theoretical thinking, pushing it into dogmatism and reducing it to commentary." That sentence, evasive as it is, has no counterpart in the 1988 book. On this one question, the 1971 volume says more. Oizerman's chosen method was not euphemism but omission, and in 1988 — when the archives were opening and Ogonyok was printing what it was printing — omission had become the more conspicuous choice of the two.
The anti-Stalinist left never wrote about Oizerman. We should say this plainly rather than manufacture a confrontation: a search across the Biulleten' Oppozitsii in English, the ETOL run of Fourth International (1940–1956), the collected English Trotsky, Intercontinental Press (1968–1986) and International Viewpoint (1982–2003) turns up his name nowhere. The tradition did not track Soviet academic philosophy as a scholarly field, and did not review its monographs. What it tracked, closely, was the moments when the state broke into science — and those it caught early.
In September 1948, in Fourth International, Raya Dunayevskaya (writing as "Freddie Forrest") devoted a section of "Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew" to the June 1947 philosophy conference, observing that "no Soviet philosopher missed the significance of Zhdanov's appearance at their conference" and that Zhdanov "spoke with the authority of the Polburo when he assigned the 'philosophic workers' their new task" (the misspelling is the printed text's). The following year Ernest Germain — Ernest Mandel — reported in "Purge of Soviet Culture" that G. F. Alexandrov, the head of agitprop, had been "severely taken to task for having shown a servile adulation toward Western European thought" in his history of philosophy. That is worth pausing on. The discipline destroyed in 1947 was Oizerman's own discipline, and the charge was that a Soviet historian of Western philosophy had treated Western philosophers with too much respect. Measured against that, the fact that this book argues with Husserl, Popper and Sartre by name and from their own texts is not nothing. It is the distance the profession travelled between Alexandrov's disgrace and Oizerman's monograph, and Oizerman is owed the credit for occupying that ground even as he declines to describe how it was won. In January 1951 the same journal ran R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen's two-part "The Lysenko Case", dating the assault on genetics to "A Ukrainian plant breeder, T.D. Lysenko, and a professor of philosophy, I.I. Prezent" in the early 1930s, and locating the baseline in the period when Vavilov's circle "had come into prominence in the days of Lenin and Trotsky, when science was free in the Soviet Union."
That last clause invites a challenge, and the challenge should be met rather than avoided. On 16 June 1933 — two years after the Deborin resolution — Trotsky replied from Prinkipo to three American comrades on exactly this question, and what he wrote was not a defence of philosophical liberty. "Viewed from this standpoint, philosophical activity lies between art and politics, closer to politics than to art. In philosophy, the party itself occupies a distinct militant position, which is not the case—at least not to the same extent—in the field of art." Objections that "by the 'dogmatization' and 'canonization' of dialectical materialism, the party prevents the free development of philosophical and scientific thought" he dismissed in a sentence: they "do not deserve serious attention." He wanted liberty for painters and novelists; for philosophers he wanted a party line, and he compared philosophical dilettantes to amateurs experimenting in a factory or a hospital. He appears not to have registered what had been done in Moscow two years earlier under that same principle.
So the tradition this series writes from does not come to the question with clean hands, and the introduction that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. What the 1933 letter does contain is the distinction that makes the criticism of Oizerman possible at all, and Trotsky put it in the next breath: "But least of all does this signify that in the sphere of philosophy the party can act as if all questions have already been resolved for it, and that it has nothing to expect from the further development of scientific thought." A party that takes a position in a live argument, and knows the argument is live, is one thing. A party that has resolved the questions, and whose Programme can be quoted as the terminus of an epistemological proof, is another. The whole history that Oizerman's book leaves out is the record of the first turning into the second — and Trotsky, who did not foresee it clearly enough in 1933, at least named the line that was crossed.
As history of philosophy, this is a serious book by a serious man, and much of it can be read for profit: the Kant, the Hegel, the account of how the ideal of an above-party philosophy was itself the product of a particular class settlement, the taxonomy of trends. Its conclusion contains a sentence that ought to be quoted against most of its neighbours on this list — that the history of philosophical thought is one "in which, it is my deepest conviction, there are no trivial pages."
He was right about that, and the pages he left blank were not trivial either.