Lyubov Axelrod
Lyubov Isaakovna Axelrod (born Esther Axelrod;
philosopher
and an art theoretician.
Early life
Axelrod was born in the family of a
narodnik organization at age 16. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1887, with the assistance of Leo Jogiches (lover of Rosa Luxemburg) when the Vitebsk organisation collapsed in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III of Russia organised by Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.[1]
Political career
1892 to 1918
In 1892 she became a Marxist and joined the
in 1903, she joined the Bolsheviks, but split with them soon afterwards, at the same time as Plekhanov.In 1906 Axelrod returned to Russia during an amnesty and became a leading Russian authority on Marxist philosophy, second only to Plekhanov, as well as working with the Mensheviks' illegal organisation. Her Philosophical Essays, published in 1906, were acknowledged by both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as the definitive rebuttal of the 'neo-Kantians'
Pyotr Maslov and Aleksandr Potresov to produce the fortnightly journal Delo ('Fact'). After the February Revolution of 1917 she joined the central committee of the Menshevik party, and following the October Revolution of November 1917 she was reunited with Plekhanov[citation needed] in the small anti-Bolshevik group Yedinstvo.[1] She abstained from party politics after the May 1918 death of Plekhanov, and made it her life's work to defend his philosophy.[2]
Later career
In the 1920s she first worked at the
Menshevism. In the 1930s her version of Marxism was officially denounced as a "Mechanistic revision of Marxism"[3]
and she faded into obscurity.
She died on 5 February 1946 in Moscow.
Published works
- Against Idealism (1922)
- Marx as a Philosopher (1925)
- Critique of the Foundations of Bourgeois Sociology and Historical Materialism (1925)
- The Idealist Dialectic of Hegel and the Materialist Dialectic of Marx (1934)
References
- ^ a b Schmidt, O.Yu., Bukharin N.I. et al eds (1926). Большая советская энциклопедия vol 2. Moscow. p. 29.
{{cite book}}:|first1=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Wetter, Gustav (1959). Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. London: Routledge and Regan Paul Ltd.
- ^
ISBN 9781786634283. Retrieved 24 February 2023.and L.I. Axelrod.
The most prominent proponents of the mechanist trend were I.I. Skortsov-Stepanov, A.K. Timiriazev
External links
- (in Russian) (in Alexander M. Kobrinsky's library): Site devoted to Lyubov Axelrod
- Frederick Choate's site on Lyubov Axelrod
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