You are being deliberately obtuse, Charles. There were academic specialists in the history of 19th and early 20th century German philosophy in the FSU, just as in most civilized countries. Some of these doubtless studied the neo-Ks. Some of these specialists may have been Marxists too.
You make a big mistake, btw, if you think that all of them were. In fact, Marxism was pretty roundly hated in Soviet philosophical circles, largely because it was obligatory and because the official stuff was so awful and dull. This hatred did not find wide expression until perestroika and democratization. Then the dominant trends that emerged with the neo-mystical religious-nationalist existentialism in the tradition of Nicholas Berdyayev and Western style libertarianism (Nozick, etc.). Marxism of the sort that Western Marxism would find congenial, e.g., Boris Kagarlitsky and Roy Medvedev, simply never caught on. Among serious Soviet scholars of intellectual history, I would be surprised if very many were Marxists any more than they had to be.
>
>For starters, here's Lenin
>
>"So far we have examined empirio-criticism taken by itself. We must now
>examine it in its historical development and in its connection and relation
>with other philosophical trends. First comes the question of the relation
>of Mach and Avenarius to Kant.
>. . . .
>
>Both Mach and Avenarius began their philosophical careers in the
>'seventies, when the fashionable cry in German professorial circles was
>"Back to Kant". And, indeed, both founders of empirio-criticism in their
>philosophical development started from Kant. "
. . .
>CB: Lenin seems to be fully aware of late 19th Century "Back to Kantism" .
>That would seem to be neo-Kantianism. Are you saying that Soviet
>philosophers were not aware of this discussion in Lenin's book ? I doubt
>it.
>
I am sure they were moreaware of it than they cared to be. Btw you can look
at Mach's discussion of the "back to Kant" movement in the first chapters of
The Analysis of the Sensations, where, describing his own career, he talks
about his struggle to liberate himself from Kantianism. As I said, Lenin's
not necessarily an authority on thsi stuff unless the police make him one.
Mach also has a very interesting and rather courageous (in the context of Imperial Austro-Hungary) republican credo, where he states that even as a child, he could not understand how people could stand to live under a king "even for one minute"! As a deputy on the Austro-Hungarian parliament Mach was a supporter of labor reforms.
jks
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