Description
THERE has been a tendency in Great Britain to consider Marx-ism primarily as a body of economic and social doctrine and to concentrate attention on surplus value, historical materialism, the class struggle and the alleged decline of capitalism. But Marxism is also, in a wide sense of the word, a system of thought and conduct comprising views about the most significant features of the universe and the principal purposes of human life.
It is this philosophy-the meta-physics, ethics and intellectual tradition inaugurated by Marx and Engels and continued by Lenin and Stalin-that Professor Acton discusses in this book, now reissued with a new preface and minor revisions. Disregarding for the sake of greater clarity the historical order in which the Marxist doctrines were published, he first discusses Dialectical Materialism and, in the second part of the book, the social theories and ethics known as Scientific Socialism.
If his first aim is to expound and interpret, his second is to criticise. He holds that the fatal theoretical flaw in Marxism-Leninism is the mingling of anti-metaphysical positivism with a form of speculative metaphysics, but many other confusions and fallacies come under his scrutiny.
The author is Professor of Philosophy in the University of London and editor of the quarterly journal Philosophy. He was Visiting Professor of Philosophy in the University of Chicago in 1949 and is a former President of the Aristotelian Society. ISBN:ILLUSIONOFTHE
