AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SOVIET MARXISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE SOVIET MARXISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE 1917-1932 By DAVID JORAVSKY Volume 17 I~ ~~o~J~~~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published in 1961 This edition first published in 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1961 David Joravsky All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 10: 0-415-42029-6 (Set) ISBN 10: 0-415-47486-8 (Volume 17) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-42029-7 (Set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-47486-3 (Volume 17) Publisher's Note The Publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the qualiry of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The Publishers have made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. SOVIET MARXISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE 1917 - 1932 by DAVID JORAVSKY Routledge and Kegan Paul LONDON First published 1961 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Cox and J¥yman, Ltd London, Fakenham and Reading Copyright David Joravsky 1961 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism To DORIS CONTENTS Preface page lX PART ONE THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY HERITAGE Orthodox Marxism and Natural Science 3 I. 2. Lenin and the Partyness of Philosophy 24 PART TWO THE SOVIET SETTING, 1917-1929 3. Intra-Party Politics and Philosophy 47 4. The Cultural Revolution and ' Bour- geois' Scientists 62 5. The Cultural Revolution and Marxist Philosophers 76 PART THREE THE ANOMALOUS REJECTION OF POSITIVISM 6. Mechanism as a Tendency 93 7. The First Challenges to Mechanism, 1922-1924 107 8. The Formation of Factions, 1924-1926 119 9. The Mechanist Faction: Propagandists and Philosophers 132 10. The Mechanist Faction: Natural Scientists 150 Deborin and His Students 170 I I. 12. Deborinite Natural Scientists 182 13. Social Theorists the Deborinite 10 Faction 198 14. Closing the Controversy, 1926-1929 205 vii CONTENTS 15. 'Classical' Authority and the Cultural Revolution page 215 PART FOUR 'f H E G REA T B REA K , I 929-I 932 16. The Great Break for Natural Scientists 233 17. The Great Break for Philosophers 250 PART FIVE PHYSICS ANi) BIOLOGY IN THE FIRST PHASE 1917-1932 18. The 'Crisis' in Physics 275 19· The Crisis in Biology 296 20. Conclusion 311 Abbreviations 316 Notes 317 Bibliography 391 Index 423 viii PREFACE T HIS book did not grow out of an interest in the capability of Soviet technologists, which has had a tendency to dominate recent discussions of Soviet science. It grew out of an interest in the intellectual history of the Russian Revolution, out ofa desire to understand the modern analogues to Marat and Lavoisier in an earlier revolution, or to Calvin and Servetus in another. It may be naive for a contemporary of Lysenko and N. I. Vavilov, who enter the last pages of this history and will be major figures in the sequel, to believe that interest in such a subject can be different from animus or enthusiasm, that a desire to under stand such people need not be a desire to expose or vindicate. Naive or not, that is my belief. I hope that this history will be a contribution, however limited, to the satisfaction of a similar interest and desire in others. The focus here is on Soviet Marxist philosophy of natural science, as it developed in its first phase, from 1917 to 1932. 'Na tural science' is used in the conventional sense to mean the systematized knowledge of nature, with the exception equally conventional-of human nature. The 'philosophy of natural science' is, of course, a controversial concept that may be used to indicate such diverse things as emotions, Weltan schauu.ngen, or methodologies that claim derivation from and application to natural science. Fortunately, it has not been necessary to attempt a definition of my own in order to review the arguments that Soviet Marxists fell into when trying to define theirs. But it has been necessary to make extended excursions into their philosophical heritage from pre-revolu tionary times, into certain policies and dissensions of the Soviet Communist Party from the Revolution to the early 'thirties, into the changing nature of t.h e Soviet scholarly community IX