Background

Lyubov Axelrod was born as Esther Axelrod in the family of a rabbi in Dunilovichi, Vilna gubernia of the Russian Empire (now Pastavy District, Belarus) in 1868.

Education

Lyubov Axelrod studied at the University of Bern where she received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1900.

Career

In 1906, she returned to Russia where she was politically active. Axelrod started her academic career at the Institute of Red Professors in 1921. She held this post until 1923 and later worked at the Soviet Institute of Philosophy. Axelrod also worked as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Moscow State University from 1921 to 1925. In 1925, she took up a post of a professor in the Department of Historical Materialism. She held this post until her death.

Lyubov Axelrod began writing in 1902 when she became a contributor to the newspaper Iskra and Zarya. She published her first book Philosophical Essays: A Philosophical Critics of Historical Materialism in 1906. Later she wrote Protiv Idealizma (Against the Idealism), Karl Marks kak filosof (Karl Marx as Philosopher) and other books. Her last book was published in 1934.

Achievements

• Lyubov Axelrod was a Russian philosopher, revolutionary, and writer who was famous for her books devoted to Marxism. Her most famous book is Philosophical Essays: A Philosophical Critics of Historical Materialism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Philosophical Essays: A Philosophical Critics of Historical Materialism

    (Russian edition)

    1906

Politics

Lyubov Axelrod became a member of the narodnik organization in 1883. However, she became a Marxist in 1892 and joined the Geneva-based Emancipation of Labor group. When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks Axelrod joined the Bolsheviks, but soon she left this party. In 1910, she joined the Central Trade Union Bureau in St Petersburg.

When the First World War began Axelrod argued that Germany was the aggressor and Russia had a right to defend itself. After the February Revolution of 1917, she joined the central committee of the Menshevik party. Later she joined the little anti-Bolshevik group Yedinstvo. Axelrod was the closest associate of Georgi Plekhanov. After his death, she abstained from party politics.

Views

Lyubov Axelrod argued against Marxist historical materialism of neo-Kantian epistemology and epistemology of Ernst Mach. In her book, Philosophical Essays Axelrod criticized neo-Kantians such as Nikolai Berdyaev and Peter Struve. Axelrod took the pseudonym Orthodox because she was the defender of the "purity" of Marxist philosophy. She also was critical of both Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin during their debate over Empiriocriticism in 1908-1909, branding their ideas anti-Marxist.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996
• Dialectical Materialism
  1959
• Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932 Originally published in 1961. Russian Marxist philosophy of science originated among men and women who gave their whole lives to rebellion against established authority. The original tension within Marxist philosophy between positivism and metaphysics was repressed but not resolved in this first phase of Soviet Marxism. In this volume the author correlates the development of ideas with trends in the Cultural Revolution and against this background it is possible to understand why debates over general philosophy gave way to conflicts over specific sciences in the aftermath of the first Five Year Plan and why there was a genuine crisis in Soviet biology.
  1961