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SOCIAL DETERMINISM: ORTHODOX MARXISM
The most impressive system of social determinism in our times was developed by orthodox Marxism. Its leading ideals are embodied in the writings of Engels, Plechanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin. Whether or not these men were faithful to Marx’s own meaning in all major respects is historically unimportant, for it was they who determined the dominant theoretical traditions of the Marxist movement. Our exposition and criticism will not aim at comprehensiveness but will focus on the way in which this philosophy treated the problem of heroic action in history.
The impressiveness of the orthodox Marxist position lay in two features which distinguished it from the Hegelian and Spencerian views. In the latter the doctrine of evolution was a metaphysical principle from which the theory of social determinism was deduced by alleged logical principles. Among the Marxists the theory of determinism was presented as a doctrine that rested foursquare on the solid ground of historical experience. They projected their positions, including the conclusions about the role of great men, on the basis of detailed historical studies. These presumably confirmed their fundamental hypothesis that changes in the mode of economic production, and the clash of group interests resulting therefrom, were the determining factor in human history. Where Hegel was mystical and Spencer eclectic, the Marxists considered themselves scientific and monistic.
It is easy to establish that orthodox Marxism, particularly where it invokes the notions of dialectical necessity and historical inevitability, is shot through with metaphysical elements every whit as questionable as the views it criticized. Nonetheless it remains true that it worked over a vast amount of empirical material and made substantial contributions to our understanding of the historical past and present. For some periods of human history, it could legitimately claim ample confirmation for its hypothesis, for example, the decline of feudalism, the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the English, American, French, and February Russian revolutions. As a
