The Soviet Union: Gorbachev, perestroika and socialism
The Russian revolution of 1917 was originally conceived as part of a transition to socialism on a global scale. The failure of that strategy led to a far‐reaching debate about the means by which a relatively backward Soviet Russia could advance by itself to a communist future. The Gorbachev years saw the issue addressed in terms of the construction of a ‘humane, democratic socialism’, seen as part of a global process; individual scholars and publicists advanced still further towards a socialism that would embody a multi‐party system and a variety of forms of ownership. Increasingly, however, still more radical commentators identified the origin of Soviet difficulties as Leninism itself. There was, in fact, little popular support for a return to capitalism; but the experience of Soviet rule showed that the authorities in that country needed the political experience of the West as much as they needed its capital investment.
The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century
The explosion of national emotions in Eastern Europe in the last few years has demanded a serious re-evaluation of the historic clash between Marxism and nationalism. The Soviet system claimed to have resolved the national question, and now the questions of the day would seem to involve why the Soviet system failed to resolve the national question, and why so many people have been fooled into believing that it had. There is a lot of fuel for future research. Leonas Sabaliunas's study of Lithuanian social democracy demonstrates that even in the years of Soviet stagnation scholars in the west were examining aspects of the question of nationalism and Marxism. Scholars with a centrist orientation to Moscow tended to dismiss such particularism, but in the new era of Soviet life, the character of the national movements has gained new importance for comprehending Moscow's problems. Sabaliunas's topic concerned socialism in a particularly complicated region with conflicting traditions—Polish culture, Jewish socialism, and an emerging Lithuanian national consciousness, all fermenting under a Russian administration. According to the author, the national question would seem to have been more important than class, and the Lithuanian Social Democrats who refused to join Bolshevik ranks eventually ran afoul of their own contradictions in advocating class conflict and class conciliation at the same time. The fundamental tension in social democracy in Lithuania lay in the problem of defining a cultural, ethnic, and economic entity. Marxism anticipated the existence of one workers' movement representing all toilers in a territorial unit, but how was one to define that unit? Lenin defined it as the Russian Empire, others claimed smaller territorial identities, and the Lithuanians, and the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) considered Lithuania just such a distinct entity. They held that workers of all nationalities—Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian—should accept the leadership of the LSDP, but leaders of those other groups had their own territorial identifications. Such is the meat of Sabaliunas's work. The work includes statistical evaluation of LSDP publications, strike action, and organizational development. Although the work was mainly done in the period of stagnation in the Soviet Union, the author apparently even had access to some party materials in Vilnius. In the" light of the struggle for control of the Institute of Party History in 1990 and 1991, one has to worry about the safety of the materials for future scholars.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.