276
DANIEL BELL
quiry that could have led to a broader, more humanistic Socialist
philosophy; and, second, that this return to the "young Marx" was
a stage "in the pilgrim's progress of those coming out of the Marxist
forest." The concept of alienation, I said, was a radical, and today
a necessary, tool of analysis, but it had to stand on its own feet,
"without the crutch of Marx."
Urban had written me that he agreed in large part with my
thesis, and added, wryly, that if published in Poland
it
would make
the revisionists unhappy. I wrote back that I knew the "risk" I was
running, but was lucky in that I did not have to conduct the debate
on his terms, as the revisionists were forced to, within the Marxist
framework.
This was the background, then, of the dinner and talk that
evening. A stocky man, well-built, with a self-assured manner,
Urban greeted me quite cordially. His English was fluent, and he
was quick in
his
replies. The apartment was comfortable, but not
showy, with a library full of books in English, Russian, and German,
as well as Polish, and I noticed that many of the volumes were
quite recent. Apparently Urban made it a point to be
au courant
with Western philosophical and sociological writings. The other
dinner guest that evening was a journalist who I shall call Caplan–
sky. He was thin-lipped and wore rimless glasses, which gave
him
a
severe look; and in the discussion he was more ideological- or
perhaps one should say more dogmatic-than our host.
Urban opened the conversation by telling Caplansky about my
essay, and then said that the writings of the young Marx were con–
fused and that the source of the confusion was Hegelianism. Marx–
ist writing, he said, had to be purged of its Hegelian obscurities;
what it needed was an infusion of Polish logic. I asked
him
for an
example, and he replied, "Kotarbinsky"! I forbear commenting on
the irony that students studying Kotarbinsky during the Stalinist
period had been put in jail, and now the party's official ideologist
was urging a marriage of Marxism with praxiology. A strange
dialectic indeed.
Urban was apparently seeking to exemplify this new approach,
for he told me that he was engaged in a study which would deal
with logic, communication theory, linguistics and philology from a
Marxist point of view. (From his description of the work, I could
