The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (150 page)

(1646–1716)
Gerrman rationalist philosopher and mathematician. Born in Leipzig at the end of the Thirty Years War, Leibniz took a degree in law. He entered on a political and diplomatic career in 1666. This took him to the principal courts of Europe, from Paris to St Petersburg. There he met the learned men of the day. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He and Newton arrived at the calculus independently. He held a debate by correspondence with Samuel Clarke on Newton's notion of space. His learned work was not isolated from his public; he wrote the
Theodicy
for the Queen of Prussia and the
Monodology
for Eugene of Savoy. He founded the Berlin Academy of Science. In Hanover he was in charge of the ducal library, from which his scientific and philosophical works have been abstracted with difficulty. (He turned down an offer to take charge of the Vatican Library.) He was privy counsellor of justice to the Electors of Hanover and Brandenburg, and Peter the Great; imperial privy counsellor, and Baron of the Empire.
Leibniz was a practical rather than a theoretical political philosopher. Very little of his writings contain anything that could be regarded as political theory. But he had a grand political vision and strategy for Europe which anticipates by three centuries the contemporary vision. Europe of his time was suffering the ravages of the Thirty Years War. The French had to be restrained in the interests of a united Europe if the Turks were to be constrained and ejected from their march westward. Standing in the way of unity were the religious divisions. Leibniz saw it as his task to bring about a reconciliation between the contending factions. To this end he wrote numerous treatises and letters on the subjects of contention—nature and grace, transubstantiation, and so forth. In these he tried to find a rational basis for discussion and, hopefully, for agreement. It can be argued that the whole of Leibniz's philosophy is designed to the same end, starting with the notion of the combinatory arts and proceeding to the notion of pre-established harmony, though the idea that these abstruse metaphysical notions would somehow mend the rift in Christendom is a testimony to Leibniz's optimism rather than a blueprint for religious and political harmony.
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Consuming, parasitic class, represented by an idle élite engaged in continuous public demonstration of their status. Idea particularly associated with the American sociological economist, Thorstein Veblen , who published
The Theory of the Leisure Class
in 1899. Veblen saw the fundamental human motive as the maximization of status rather than orientation towards any monetary variable. In establishing status, expenditure was more important than income, enhanced status being often achieved by ‘conspicuous consumption’. Thus a leisure class comes into being which dominates and trivializes leisure within a culture, though this pattern of consumption may be a necessary feature of the working of the economic system. Veblen's theories belong in the category of critical analysis of consumer society, a form of discourse embracing such writers as Lewis Mumford , J. K. Galbraith , and J. B. Priestley .
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A term coined by Stalin after Lenin's death and used by him to justify the cult of personality around Lenin (1870–1924) (and subsequently himself) and to legitimize his political battle with Trotsky . A distinction must be made between the icon of infallibility created by Stalin (for example in
Leninism
, 1933) and the historical man. Lenin would surely have disapproved of the label but, nevertheless, Leninism has come to represent his core contributions—on the party, the
state
,
imperialism
, and revolution—to Marxist theory.
In
What Is To Be Done?
(1902) Lenin addressed the question of party organization. The book's specific intention was to criticize the ‘economists'’ stress upon legal struggles, which Lenin argued lost sight of Social Democracy's maximum programme which was to challenge for state power. He later admitted that in denigrating minimum demands he had ‘gone too far in the opposite direction’ and
What Is To Be Done?
was not republished after 1917. Lenin distinguished between trade union and socialist consciousness. Those who promoted the idea of spontaneous revolutionary activity by the proletariat were really abdicating political leadership. Left to itself the working class would inevitably adopt bourgeois ideology (although Lenin wrote, in 1905, that ‘the working class is instinctively, spontaneously social democratic’ (
The Reorganization of the Party
). What was needed was a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. Its strategy and tactics should be rooted in the working class and its task was to lead the latter to a socialist consciousness. Lenin argued for the creation of parallel secret and mass organizations.
The 1903 Bolshevik-Menshevik split revealed opposing views on the nature of revolution and how far Lenin was moving away from what was regarded as Marxist orthodoxy. In
The Development of Capitalism in Russia
(1899) Lenin had followed
Plekhanov
in arguing that Russia was already capitalist but because the bourgeoisie was weak, it was left to the proletariat to assume the tasks of the democratic revolution. Socialism was a distant prospect. However, the 1905 revolution caused a radical shift in Lenin's thinking. In
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
, he eschewed any alliance with the liberals who had sided with Tsarism against the revolutionary movement. The revolution would still have a bourgeois character but would be directed by ‘a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants’. Traditionally Marxists had regarded the peasantry as a conservative even reactionary class. Lenin maintained an ambivalent attitude towards it throughout his life but he became convinced that the social weight of the peasants would determine the immediate outcome of the revolution. When the Provisional Government refused to implement land reform after February 1917, Lenin placed the Bolsheviks firmly behind the peasants' demand for land.
His 1905 writings had indicated that there might be some ‘growing over’ between the democratic and socialist revolutions.
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1916) presented the possibility of an immediate socialist revolution based upon Lenin's analysis of a fundamental change in the nature of
capitalism
—from competitive to monopoly. Banking cartels made enormous profits through exporting capital to backward countries; some of the repatriated profit was used to create a workers' aristocracy in Western Europe and so block the development of revolutionary consciousness. However, global capitalism and superexploitation provoked national self-determination movements and the contradictions of uneven development in peripheral countries (like Russia) which Lenin termed ‘the weakest links’. Additionally, economic rivalry between the imperialist powers would result in war and international revolution.
By 1917 Lenin had reached the same conclusion as Trotsky—the idea of a continuous transition between the democratic and socialist revolutions. In the
April Theses
he rejected conditional support for the Provisional Government and demanded that the Bolsheviks agitate for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. After government repression of the Bolsheviks in July, he realized that a peaceful development of the revolution was not possible and advised the party to plan for insurrection.
Whilst in hiding before October, Lenin wrote
State and Revolution
, which was a libertarian re-appraisal of Marx and Engels' views on the
withering away of the state
, stressing the commune rather than the
dictatorship
of the proletariat as the organizational form for the transition to socialism and barely mentioning the role of the party. Lenin rejected both parliamentarism (anticipating the closure of the Constituent Assembly by the Soviet government in January 1918) and reformism, making a distinction between bourgeois and socialist democracy (‘democracy for the people and not democracy for the money bags’).
However, the revolutionary optimism of
State and Revolution
quickly evaporated in the post-1917 period. Amidst foreign intervention and civil war, the ‘withering away’ became increasingly problematic as a monolithic system emerged with centralized control by the party, the repression of opposition, and the decimation of independent working-class activity. Accused of state terrorism by socialist critics, Lenin responded with works such as
Left Wing Communism—An Infantile Disorder
and
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
(both 1919) which attempted to justify revolutionary violence. In his last years, however, and particularly after being incapacitated by a succession of strokes, he was preoccupied by the problems of cultural backwardness, the urban-rural dichotomy, and the bureaucratization of the state and party. His
Testament
of December 1922 called for greater political control over the
bureaucracy
, and warned against Stalin, but was suppressed by him.
Possibly the most distinctive feature of ‘Leninism’ was what Georgy Luk´cs (in
Lenin
, 1924) called its ‘revolutionary realpolitik … a concrete, unschematic, unmechanistic, purely praxis-oriented thought’. Lenin demonstrated a masterly grasp of revolutionary strategy—the need to understand the core of the problem and be able to choose the right moment to act. His opposition to dogmatism in both theory and practice has been described as opportunism but it might also be seen as an imaginative adaptation of Marxist methodology to changing historical circumstances.
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