Dialectics of the Ideal

In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his ‘activity approach’, E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as well as the malaise of postmodern relativism. This volume features Levant’s translation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal (2009), which remained unpublished until thirty years after the author’s tragic suicide in 1979.

Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.

Alex Levant holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought (York, 2007) and teaches Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. His articles on subjectivity, social memory, and signification have appeared in international journals, including Critique, Historical Materialism, and Studia Sociologia.

Vesa Oittinen, Ph. Dr. (1994), University of Helsinki, is Professor of Russian Philosophy and History of Ideas at the Aleksanteri Institute. He has published books and many articles on the history of modern philosophy, especially on Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marxism and Scandinavian and Russian philosophy.