The volume on which Plekhanov's standing as a philosopher actually rests.

It contains the two works a reader who has heard the name and wants to know why has been sent to for a century: The Role of the Individual in History and the Essays on the History of Materialism, on Holbach, Helvetius and Marx. Both are printed complete, and for most English readers this is where they live.

The first is Plekhanov's answer to a question the Populist subjectivists had botched and their positivist opponents had answered by abolishing: if history is law-governed, what is left for the great man to do? He refuses both exits - the subjectivists who made critically thinking individuals a free-standing force pulling history along, and the mechanists who reduced the individual to a negligible quantity.

The rest of the volume is a running battle, gathering the writings of the later 1890s and the first years of the new century. The enemy has changed since the first volume: no longer the Populists who denied Russia would take the capitalist road at all, but the revisionists who accepted Marxism and set about hollowing it out - Bernstein in Germany calling the movement back to Kant, and Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky and Bulgakov, the Russian legal Marxists who wanted the economics without the dialectics. The titles read like a duellist's log, and the writing is superb of its kind: quick, contemptuous, learned, and unfair the way a good prosecutor is unfair.

Volume Two of five. Translated by Julius Katzer.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.