Returning to Hegel: Revolution, Idealism, and God

Abstract

I have reached a point where Lenin has developed a dubious and rather undialectical argument in order to counter the position of God-builders such as Lunacharsky, as well as the growing theoretical and political influence of Bogdanov. If that was all there was to the story, then it would form a relatively minor incident of prerevolutionary struggles that reflects none too well on Lenin. But the story is by no means complete, for it has three further, fascinating episodes. The first episode is Lenin’s intense reengagement with Hegel six years later. After the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin found himself cloistered in the library in Berne, where he read Hegel’s core text, The Science of Logic. I am interested in a couple of elements in Lenin’s engagement with that text: One was a recasting of the relation between subjective and objective approaches that would lead to a renewed sense of subjective revolutionary intervention; the other was a direct encounter with the core of Hegel’s idealism, an encounter that had a direct bearing on his perceptions of God-building and even the revolutionary possibilities of varieties of religion outside the mainstream.

Hegelian dialectics—that pearl which those farmyard cocks … could not pick out from the shit-heap of absolute idealism.

—Lenin 1908a, 243/256