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time of Michelet and Renan, and it is in part the findings of this
scientific history which enable us to see the shortcomings as well as
the strength of Marx's conception of society. These bourgeois his–
torians have been introduced to serve as a foil to the socialist
writers, as a thesis
to
be negated. And even the concluding section
ends arbitrarily with the arrival of Lenin, like novels which close
with the marriage of the hero. For the appearance of Lenin on the
scene marks the completion of an historical cycle only from the
viewpoint of one who observes this event as a fulfillment; from
another viewpoint, it is the beginning of the dictatorship we see
today.
I have no desire to defend dialectical materialism. It includes
valuable insights (now common to modern philosophy and science)
as well as pretentious constructions, and it would be a mistake to
judge it as a monolithic whole. I wish only to point out the one–
sidedness and distortions that result from Wilson's animus. It im–
pels him to find the occult dialectic deep in every aspect of Marx's
writing, in spite of Marx's criticism of Hegel, and to lay to its
baneful influence whatever is contradictory in Marxism. He con–
trasts the speculative, religious, metaphysical side of Marx with
the firmly practical nature of Lenin. But the fact is that dialectic
first became the official philosophy of the revolutionary movement
under Lenin's leadership. In speaking of Lenin's lack of philo–
sophical interests, Wilson mentions the 'polemic against Empirio–
Criticism to show his essentially practical purpose; he ignores the
enthusiastic note-books on Hegel written during the first months of
the World War. For the sake of the artistic conception of Lenin as
a man completely unified in purpose and character, his acceptance
of dialectical materialism is presented as an incidental orthodoxy,
which may be disregarded in explaining his errors; whereas in
Trotsky it is precisely by this heritage of dialectic that Wilson
accounts for his "mysticism" of history and his confused amoral–
ism. And the effects of this fatal germ of dialectic in the Kronstadt
affair and in the conversion of the party dictatorship into an instru–
ment of oppression, as foreseen by Lenin's early critics, are re–
vealed in the chapter on Trotsky rather than on Lenin, who was
surely as responsible, if the responsibility can be laid to
individuals.
After having exposed the ravages of dialectics, Wilson offers
