Proletarian Science?: The Case of Lysenko - Softcover

Lecourt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178663239X ISBN 13: 9781786632395

Publisher: Verso, 1977

Synopsis

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who died in 1976, symbolizes one of the most notorious yet obscure episodes in the history of the Soviet Union. Emerging from provincial shadows in the Ukraine during the twenties, Lysenko achieved a meteoric career under Stalin's dictatorship, when ever greater claims were officially made for his 'environmentalism'. Overlord and autocrat of all Soviet biology after the Second World War, Lysenko's doctrines were promulgated throughout the international communist movement — from Britain to Japan — as a specifically 'proletarian' science, as opposed to mere bourgeois science. After Stalin's death, Lysenko soon plunged into discredit — although his agricultural recipes were to be approved again by Khruschev. Dominique Lecourt — author of the highly successful study Marxism and Epistemology — poses the question: what was the historical meaning of Lysenko? Was Lysenko no more than a brutal charlatan? Or did his ideas correspond — not to any canon of science — but to wider social forces at work in the USSR? Lecourt's sardonic and perceptive study provides a definitive critique of the follies of 'anti-Mendelian' biology, and a materialist account of the reasons for its triumph in Russia during the rule of Stalin. An important afterword traces the original idea of a proletarian science to its source in Bogdanov. In a major introductory essay, Louis Althusser poses the acute political problems which the history of Lysenko still represents for Communists everywhere, and for the first time directly indicts political repression in the USSR today.

About this title

About the Authors

Dominique Lecourt was a pupil of Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida at the Ecole Normal Superieure in the 1960s. Now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, his publications in English include Marxism and Epistemology and Proletarian Science?

Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178663239X
• ISBN 13: 9781786632395
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166