The volume of Plekhanov the Menshevik - everything here was written after the break of 1903, between roughly 1904 and 1913 - and, by the plain testimony of the man whose faction won, the volume of Plekhanov at his most useful. Lenin told cadres to study these particular writings.
The centrepieces are Fundamental Problems of Marxism of 1908, his compact statement of the whole system, and Materialismus Militans, three open letters demolishing the Russian followers of Ernst Mach, whose doctrine that the world is a bundle of our own sensations had become fashionable among Social-Democrats after the defeat of 1905. That polemic is Plekhanov doing in the very same months exactly what Lenin was doing in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, against exactly the same opponents. On this front the two men were allies, and the writing is superb of its combative kind.
Around them sit the essay against the vogue for god-building among left intellectuals; a run of short, lethal review-essays on the neo-Kantian and positivist philosophers of the day - Petzoldt, Rickert, Windelband, Boutroux, Bergson, Guyau; two long studies of the utopian socialists; the essay From Idealism to Materialism on Hegel's radical heirs; a preface to Deborin's textbook of dialectical materialism; and the short, sharp On the Study of Philosophy.
It is a formidable table of contents, and most of it is Plekhanov near the top of his powers - the philosopher and the political apostate running down the middle of the same years and sometimes the same page.
Volume Three of five. Prepared by the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
