In 1895 a book appeared legally in St Petersburg under the name N. Beltov, with a title clumsy enough to bore a censor into passing it. The clumsiness was deliberate; the publisher's own foreword records that propaganda for materialism was prohibited, so the author gave his book an intentionally awkward title, choosing "monist" to stand against a dualist view of history rather than advertise the materialism underneath. Beltov was Georgi Plekhanov, writing from exile, and this is the book that taught Russian Marxism how to argue.
He was answering N. K. Mikhailovsky, the ablest theorist of liberal Populism, along with the sociologist N. I. Kareyev - a sustained demolition of named opponents, quoted at length from their own pages.
The method is what makes it durable. Rather than assert historical materialism and defend it, Plekhanov reconstructs the road to it - French materialism of the eighteenth century, the French historians of the Restoration, the utopian socialists, German idealist philosophy - and shows each school breaking on a problem the next inherits. The first chapter sets the trap the whole book springs: if human nature is fixed and opinions govern the world, then opinions must themselves be explained, and the explanation cannot be opinion.
He is generous to his adversaries in a way the tradition that later canonised him mostly was not. Hegel is named more than two hundred times, and none of these figures is set up as a straw man.
A note on the text: the Russian original is of 1895, and this English translation dates from 1956, reprinted through to 1980.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
