Word: aleksandrov
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...Unsafe Condition." Even the setting was special. To Moscow, the Central Committee summoned a hundred or so top-rank philosophers, professors, theoreticians, for a nine-day conference. Assembled, they learned that the subject of discussion was to be Aleksandrov's History of Western European Philosophy. Only a year before, it had been awarded a 100,000 ruble Stalin prize. To this startled group, Zhdanov laid down the Central Committee's charges against Aleksandrov: 1) he had preached a "toothless vegetarianism" toward the philosophical enemies of Marx-Lenin-Stalin; 2) perhaps unsuspectingly, he had become "the prisoner of bourgeois...
Charged Zhdanov: "His objectivist conceptions he consistently carried out through the entire book. It is not accidental that Comrade Aleksandrov, before starting to criticize any bourgeois philosopher, pays tribute to his merits, burning incense before...
...that was not the worst of it. Continued Zhdanov: "It so happened that Comrade Aleksandrov's book received recognition from the majority of our top philosophical workers, and received numerous favorable reviews. This means that all these others also share Aleksandrov's mistakes. That bespeaks an unsafe condition on our theoretical front. . . . Such conceptions if developed here would unavoidably lead to objectivism-to slavishness to bourgeois philosophers and overstating of their merits, thus depriving our philosophy of its militant advancing spirit...
Objectivism. What was the objectionable "objectivism?" In Aleksandrov's case, it was merely the familiar polemical device of building 'em up before knocking 'em down. He had used this technique on Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel. But he had also been found guilty of playing with metaphysics, a reprehensible sin in Russia, and he had depicted Marxism as an evolution from earlier philosophy. Thundered Zhdanov: "The origin of Marxism was a real discovery, a revolution in philosophy." In the wake of Zhdanov's thunder, 46 of Aleksandrov's colleagues and coworkers, among them doubtless...
...critic said that Aleksandrov's "weakness for abstract and vague formulations brings him to the point where correct Marxist theses are drowning in them, and the revolutionary content of Marxism is sometimes replaced by abstract discussions...