The Development of the Monist View of History

Introduction

Plekhanov’s main philosophical book appeared legally in St Petersburg at the end of 1894, dated 1895, under the pseudonym N. Beltov; its cautious title was chosen to pass the censors. It is aimed at the populist sociologists Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Pyotr Lavrov, who explained history by the ideals of critically thinking individuals. Plekhanov answers with a history of ideas: the French materialists of the eighteenth century, the French historians of the Restoration, the utopian socialists and Hegel each came close to a unified, “monist” explanation of history, which Marx completed by grounding it in the development of productive forces. The book shaped a generation of Russian Marxists, including Lenin, and established the materialist reading of Hegel that later Soviet philosophy adopted.

Connections

Builds on

• Capital1867 · Karl Marx

More works by Georgi Plekhanov

• 1898On the Role of the Individual in History