Right after the collapse of the Second International following the outbreak of World War I and the nationalistic turn of workers’ parties in Western Europe, Lenin immersed himself in a reading and study of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Logic, leading to his 1914-1915 Hegel Notebooks.
As Kevin B. Anderson has meticulously demonstrated in his book Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Lenin’s turn to Hegel deeply influenced his theories of imperialism and of the state leading to the second Russian revolution of October 1917, as reflected in his major works from the period, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism(1917) and The State and Revolution (1917).
In this segment, we turn to Lenin’s reading and use of Hegel for critical praxis.
Core Readings
G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slconten.htm
Vladimir Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic (1914-1915), 85-238, in Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38, Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm
Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917) (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution (1917), in Selected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume II, Part I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
Kevin B. Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, 2nd edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023).
Additional Readings
Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution (London: Verso, 2017)
Louis Althusser, Lénine & la philosophie, suivi de Marx & Lénine devant Hegel (Paris: Maspéro, 1975)
Louis Althusser, “Lenin before Hegel,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press 1971), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm
Kevin B. Anderson, “Lenin’s Encounter with Hegel After Eighty Years: A Critical Assessment,” Science and Society 59, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 298, available at https://marxismocritico.com/2014/06/02/lenins-encounter-with-hegel/.
Kevin B. Anderson, “Revisiting Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, 100 Years Later,” Socialism and Democracy, 28, no. 1 (2014), available at https://kevin-anderson.com/article/revisiting-lenins-hegel-notebooks-100-years-later/.
Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (1924), trans. Nicholas Jacobs (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971), also available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/