Problems and Unproblems in Soviet Social Theory

Author(s): Lewis S. Feuer

Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1964), pp. 117-124
Published by:
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492380 .
Accessed: 17/06/2014 15:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

lNotesand Comment
SLAVIC

PROBLEMS
IN SOVIET

REVIEW

AND
UNPROBLEMS
SOCIAL
THEORY
BY LEWIS S. FEUER

The status of sociology and philosophy in the Soviet Union is radically

different from that of the physical and mathematical sciences. The
sociologists and philosophers are still regarded by the government as
ideologists, whereas the mathematicians and physicists are considered
scientists; and the ideologist is in low repute in the Soviet intellectual
community. Thirty years ago, Nikolai Bukharin observed in a remarkable essay that the cultural style of the current Soviet period would be
technicism, and that the humanities and historical sciences would be
relegated to the background. He believed that this "one-sidedness"
was founded on the economic requirements of the time. Probably,
however, the hollowness in the life of the Soviet ideologist is equally
responsible for his low estate. The sociologists and philosophers are not
regarded as independent thinkers; their job as ideological workers is to
provide a documentation and footnoted commentary on the decisions
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Young men of ability consequently tend to avoid choosing a life work
in the social sciences and philosophy. Why, they say, should they sacrifice their intellectual independence at the outset of their lives?
I attended the meetings of a large unofficial philosophical circle at
Moscow State University, but of its fifty or so members who were discussing existentialism and Bertrand Russell with great animation, only
two or three were philosophers and sociologists. When free philosophy
and social science become possible in the Soviet Union, one may be
surprised to find the most original ideas coming from persons in other
departments, who have not stultified themselves with ideological commitment. Certainly no one among the official ideologists dares say what
Kapitza, the eminent physicist, did a few years ago, that the dialectical
philosophy was of no use to the practicing scientist. Because of their
MR. FEUER is professor of philosophy and social science at the University of California,
Berkeley.
1 N. Bukharin, Culture in Two Worlds (New York, 1934), pp. 18-19.

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

118

Slavic Review

prestige as creative, free thinkers, the scientists have a freedom the

ideologists lack. Thus, the scientists have taken the initiative in arguinig against the government's policy which requires at least two years'
work in industry on the part of 80 per cent of those admitted to the
universities. The scientists emphasize the loss of two creative years in
their young scientists' lives. Nobody would seriously deplore a similar
loss of originality on the part of their young ideologists, for ideological
originality is altogether regarded as perverse.
This repression of ideological originality has carried with it a curious
consequence: that there is no history of Soviet philosophy extant in
the Soviet Union. When I asked one of the researchers at the Institute
of Philosophy why this was so, he replied there was no need of one
because, unlike America, they had no different philosophical schools,
and that everyone worked within the framework of Marxism. He did
add, however, that a chapter on the Lenin period had been written for
their collective history of philosophy but was withdrawn after it had
been severely criticized by various people. We might say that the history of Soviet philosophy is an "unproblem" for Soviet scholars. What
is an unproblem? It is a scientific question which has to be repressed
into the social unconscious, because its answer would cast doubt on,
invalidate, or show to be false some official dogma of the regime. A
history of Soviet philosophy, if it were written, indeed, from the
Marxist standpoint, would inevitably show how under the overwhelming force of the agencies of a dictatorial planned economy, the spectrum
of alternatives which keeps philosophical thought alive was narrowed
until there remained only an official ideology. Soviet thinkers acknowledge that "the 'cult of personality' tore apart the tradition of Soviet
philosophy," but there has been as yet no rehabilitation, even in an
intellectual sense, of the writings of Bukharin, the only outstanding
sociologist and social philosopher of Soviet times. There has been a
revival of interest in A. V. Lunacharsky's aesthetics because he died
before the purges, and although he was an exponent of freedom for the
artist, somehow was never ruled beyond the pale.
The young researchers of the Institute of Philosophy are in their
own labors torn between the demands of ideological warfare and their
own free philosophical inclinations. The Section on Bourgeois Philosophy and Sociology, for instance, is organized to prepare authoritative
"refutations" of the principal Western philosophies; such ideological
operations are under way against Husserl, Hartmann, German realists,
German neo-Hegelians, American critical realists, Anglo-American
emergent evolutionists, personalists, French positivists, neo-Thomists,
neo-positivists, neo-orthodox Protestants. But among the researchers
there is quite evident a strain toward their own philosophical expression; in particular, they tend to formulations of a kind which we might
call "Soviet existentialism" or "existentialist Marxism.." Their concern

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Problems and Unproblems in Soviet Social Theory

119

with the freedom of the individual implies that they have a potential
of providing a critique of the "alienation" of individuals in the Soviet
planned society. Nevertheless, although they can write studies of the
concept of "alienation" in Marx's early manuscripts, and essaysshowing
how the philosophies of Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger, Niebuhr, Sartre,
et al. are symptoms of the modes of "alienation" of man under capitalist society, the "alienation" of themselves, their fellow intellectuals, the
peasants, and the workingmen in Soviet society remains for them perforce an unproblem.
The history of sociological science is bound up in America and
Western Europe with two sorts of attitudes toward society-one a social
reformist, critical outlook, the other a social pessimism according to
which the existing realities are a part of the inevitable scheme of
things; the Webbs, Robert Park and the Chicago School, Lynd, Lester
Ward, Beard, and Dewey exemplified the former standpoint, and William G. Sumner, Pareto, and Max Weber were essentially representatives of the latter. In the Soviet Union, however, sociology maintains
a kind of shadowy existence, because on the one hand it must curb its
reforrmier's
impulse to criticize and reconstruct the workings of Soviet
society, and on the other, it cannot allow itself to regard Soviet life
with the analytic-descriptive tools of pessimistic realism. Consequently,
Soviet sociology tries to adjust itself to the role of a scientific servitor,
who amiably confines himself to those small assignments the regime
confides to him, and joins in the conspiracy of silence never to raise the
big, important questions. In the West every few years we have had
books calling on the social scientists to face the truly significant issues;
J. A. Hobson's Free Thought in the Social Sciences, Robert Lynd's
Knowledge for What?, and C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination were all exhortations of this character. The freedom of the
Soviet social scientists will be proclaimed one day only when one of
them dares write a book on the unproblems of Soviet social science and
the social causes of their own pusillanimity. No Soviet sociologist has
dared to raise the question of the validity of Michels' law of oligarchy
in the Soviet Communist Party; no Soviet sociologist these last thirty
years has written a single essay or book analyzing the phenomenon of
anti-Semitism in its widespread manifestations. No Soviet social scientist has dared even to suggest a study of the social conditions that made
possible the "cult of personality," the masochist acquiescence of the
Soviet people to a generation of terror, and the role of the party in
masochizing itself and the people.
Committed as servitors to the Central Committee, the social scientists
find themselves, sometimes reluctantly, compelled to fulfill the role of
ideologists rather than scientists. It was Engels indeed who first spoke
of "an end to all ideology" which would ensue when people brought
into consciousness the unconscious impelling forces of their thought

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

120

Slavic Review

processes.2 The young sociologists in the Soviet Union would like to

achieve the transition from ideology to science, but thus far have had
to contain their scientific efforts within ideological bounds. A group of
investigators, for instance, have pursued investigations in Tambov and
Lipetsk on the persistence of the religious sects. They studied local
archives for historical background and engaged in interviews. They
never raised the most basic methodological question: how reliable are
interviews concerning religious beliefs when the person interviewed
knows very well that the interviewer is closely associated with a regime
that is actively hostile toward religion and penalizes religious persons?
Apart from this basic methodological problem, the researchers were
debarred from theorizing with any freedom concerning the persistence
of religion. L. N. Mitrokhin, one of the investigators, acknowledged
they had no satisfactory theory; he was prepared to consider the effect
that the Second World War might have had in the revival of religion,
but he would never consider the perhaps unsatisfying character of
Soviet social existence and ideology itself. Mitrokhin's statistics showed
that about 80 per cent of the believers were women, but when I suggested that this seemed to indicate some "Freudian," sexual factor, he
could only wave such an hypothesis aside. His whole study had to be
cast in terms of a contribution to a more successful struggle for atheist
indoctrination on the part of the government. Given this standpoint,
can one expect a sociology of religion in the Soviet Union which will
be methodologically sound and exploratory in theory?
Again, at Leningrad, there is an able group of social scientists working at their Academy of Sciences under A. G. Kharchev; their Laboratory of Social Research has, under the direction of Vladimir Alexandrovich Yadoff, been carrying on an extensive study in industrial sociology. They have been trying to ascertain the relation between the
subjective feelings of workers and their objective output. To this end,
they have secured the responses to questionnaires from a sample of
3,000 young workers from five types of factories. The survey was care2 The phrase "end of ideology" has had a curious history.
It became well known
through the book of Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, which followed in the footsteps of
Raymond Aron's "the end of the ideological age" in his The Opium of the Intellectuals.
Seymour M. Lipset in a forthcoming essay, "The Changing Class Structure and Europeain
Politics," has tried to trace the origin of the phrase through a series of contemporary
writers to Raymond Aron. Actually, however, both the concept and expression "an end to
all ideology" were used by Friedrich Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy (cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on
Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer, New York, 1959, p. 238). The nlotion followed
direcLly fromnEngels' conception of ideology as a thought process in which the thinker was
unconscious of the real, impelling, underlying motive forces. The current usage of the
"end of ideology" might be described as an unconscious movement of "Back to Engels."
American writers, however, look to the end of Marxism itself as a form of ideology, w%hile
Marxists use it to forecast the end of bourgeois political theory. Among young Soviet
philosophers, Engels' phrase suggests a notion of philosophy as the critique of ideology, a
notion which I once developed in several articles in Science and Society twenty years ago.

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Problems and Unproblems in Soviet Social Theory

121

fully designed; the workers were drawn from six groups, unskilled,
skilled manual, skilled machine, conveyor operators, automatized, and
maximum automatized workers. The five factories included machine
industrial, textile, building, chemical, and food processing plants. The
investigators obtained objective data on the production output, both
quantitative and qualitative, of each of the 3,000 workers, as well as
information on their discipline and "social activities." They then tried
to correlate the productivity data with the degree of satisfaction felt by
the workingmen in their jobs. They found that dissatisfaction in one's
job could reduce productivity from 10 to 20 per cent, while satisfaction
in work could raise it from 10 to 15 per cent. Their most unusual
finding, however, was that the chief cause for dissatisfaction with one's
job was (what they called) "the poor organization of industry." A workingmnan,for example, would report in the morning at his factory, but
the necessary raw materials would not be on hand for manufacturing
to begin. The workingman would then receive his basic daily wage,
but through no fault of his own he would earn no production premia.
This situation was wholly unlike the experience of American workers,
for whom managerial inefficiency is not a primary factor in job discontent. The Leningrad sociologists are clearly, however, circumscribed in
the use they can make of their findings. They do not ask: to what
factors in the functioning of the Soviet economy do the workingmen
attribute the poor organization of industry? To what extent do they
regard such malfunctioning as inherent in planned economy? To what
extent do they regard it as arising from remediable bureaucratic abuses,
malpractices, and inefficiencies? The poor organization of industry, it
was found, was the chief reason for the high labor turnover, for the
wandering from job to job. Why have the unions failed to express the
workers' discontent? Is there a repressed longing to express their dissatisfaction in political terms?
Such were the unproblems which emerged as Soviet industrial sociologists outlined their work, the boundaries of their studies which may
be seen but never mentioned. The 3,000 young Leningrad workers
were assured that their answers to the questionnaires would be used
constructively; they were told that the findings would be turned over
to the government for guidance in its helping them. Would a young
worker jeopardize his bread by articulating honestly and fully the dissatisfaction he feels when he knows that all he says can be made available to the government? In a totalitarian society, there is an indeterminate margin of error in all interviewing and questionnaires, but the
study of that margin of error and the degree of its indeterminacy is the
most significant unproblem in the methodology of Soviet social science.
Political sociology in general remains forbidden territory in Soviet
social science. What kind of person selects a career in the Communist
Party apparatus? How does he compare in honesty, initiative, and in-

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

122

Slavic Revietv

telligence with those who choose ordinary professions and livelihoods?

To what extent does the political functionary tend to be a mediocrity
who enters the cadre in order to achieve a distinction and dominance
over others which he could in no other way? Does the CommuLinist
Party tend therefore to be a mediocracy? Was the denouncing of the
heretic intellectual and unorthodox a device for upward social mobility
which endeared the "cult of personality" to many mediocrats? Is this
the social root for the anti-intellectualism which wells up so readily in
Communist ranks? To such questions, as to all unproblems, the answer
given is the official rhetoric of the place of the Communist Party as the
vigilant vanguard of the Soviet people.
The young social scientists feel keenly the fact that they are not
allowed to make use of psychoanalytical concepts. At Moscow, they
suggested to me that I raise this question with the chief of the Section
on Concrete Investigations of Work and Existence (the Soviet circumlocution for "sociology"), Mr. G. V. Osipov. This I did. I asked why
Freud's books were not available in Soviet bookstores, and told how
Soviet students had complained to me of the great difficulty in finding
copies; the depository of the German originals and a few old translations in the Lenin Library scarcely do service for the huge number
of would-be readers. Osipov replied that they were opposed to "ideological coexistence"; they were willing to learn statistical techniques
and research methods from Americans, and they were glad to read
Lazarsfeld and Parsons, but, he said: "We cannot take idealism; that
we must reject, because it represents the interests of the reactionary
class." This was, of course, the official formula. What is feared, however, is not Freud's philosophy but his psychoanalytical method. What
is feared, we might say, is the bringing into consciousness of the strange
manifold contents of the Soviet unconscious. This is one "false consciousness," one ideology, whose unconscious roots must be kept untouched by scientific study. Thus the Soviet cultural censor opposes
psychoanalysis. One hears curious rationalizations for the repression of
psychoanalytical ideas. Sometimes I was told that the Soviet standpoint
believed in the rational consciousness, and that Freud held men were
irrational. I was put in the position of having to remind them how,
from the Marxist standpoint, an irrational consciousness was characteristic of all class societies.
Quietly the social scientists have dropped some of the baggage of
Marx's dialectic method, in particular, what has sometimes been called
the "principle of historical specification." According to Marx, there
were no laws of social science common to diverse social systems; every
stage of social development, for instance, has its own law of population.
It is precisely in this very field of population research that the Soviet
sociologists have put aside the Marxian model. They thus explain the
severe housing shortage and the high percentage of "abnormal housing"

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Problems and Unproblems in Soviet Social Theory

123

by arguing that such conditions are common to all countries which are
industrializing themselves; in their by-gone days of Marxist methodology, they would have denied that there could be a demographic law
common to both socialist and capitalist types of industrialization. Similarly, the Soviet demographers have found a decline in the size of their
urban families which corresponds to phenomena in European capitalist
cities. Their own evolving social policy has meanwhile made obsolete
the anti-Malthusian bias that characterized Marx's writings. Therefore, young Soviet demographers have, despite the objections of the
ideologists of the older generation, scrapped the anti-Malthusian heritage. Both capitalist and socialist societies, they say, undertake family
limitation and birth control because both experience the common influence of education, the ethic of individual happiness, and the conditions of urban life. Fortunately, the young social scientists have found
the fortifying authority of a later letter of Engels in which he acknowledged that even communist society may find itself "obliged to regulate
the production of human beings," and "to achieve by planning a result
which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in
France and Lower Austria."3
What is done in practice, however, is not acknowledged in theory.
The dialectical method may be repudiated in concrete sociological
research, but no Soviet methodologist dares to discuss openly the revision of the dialectical methodology. The status of the Marxian dialectic
is, in basic respects, an unproblem for Soviet methodology. During the
discussion which followed a lecture of mine on the sociology of science
at the Institute of Philosophy, I called attention to the contradiction
between their practice and the relevant passages in Marx's second preface to Capital. I found that although they were curiously ignorant of
the latter, they still felt compelled to deny that there could be any contradiction between their research theory and their official dogma. The
"contradictions," they insisted, were all mine.
What then is the over-all pattern concerning problems and unproblems in Soviet social science and philosophy? Where the exigencies of
competitive coexistence are directly felt, Soviet science has tended to
relinquish its dogmatic Marxism and to adopt a more flexible standpoint. Mathematical logic, for instance, enjoys a high prestige in the
Soviet Union at present because it is associated with computational
machines and electronic systems. Where technology has come into conflict with ideology, with its claims reinforced by the need to compete
with the West, there ideology has given wvay to science. But the displacement of ideology is carefully contained. Mathematical logic, for
instance, flourishes in departments of mathematics; in departments of
philosophy, on the other hand, the dialectical logicians maintain a
3 Marx and Engels onzMalthus, tranis. Dorothea L. Meek and Ronald L. Meek (Lonldon,
1953), pp. 108-9.

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

124

Slavic Review

sniping ideological warfare against the mathematical group, whose

situation remains precarious, since they are labeled "formalist,"
"static," and "undialectical." Where sociology seems to offer some possible assistance in competition with the Western wrorld, it is allowed to
propose relevant studies. The mastery of statistical and survey methods
is then regarded as part of the process of catching up with Western
technique, and eventually surpassing it. But then the ideological containment begins.
There have been students of Soviet society, such as Isaac Deutscher,
wvho have forecast a process of liberalization in Soviet intellectual life
which would be consequent on the increase of industrialization and
education. Actually, however, the chief liberalizations in science which
have taken place have been a response to the competitive world
situation (in a fashion suggestive of Hayek's analysis) rather than an
automatic result of industrialization. Where the security of the bureaucratic system is the paramount factor, ideology has held the ascendancy.
Such fields as political sociology and philosophical ethics remain almost
altogether subservient to ideological controls. No doubt the young
social scientists and philosophers aspire toward more freedom; at the
same time, the bureaucratic system, by favoring mediocrats over superiocrats, mediocrities over original thinkers, tends to perpetuate a domain of sensitive unproblems. The next era in Soviet intellectual
history will be one of a contest between social science and ideology, and
between philosophy and ideology. Engels' phrase "an end to all ideology" may be the banner of the philosophical renaissance in the Soviet
Union.

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:12:19 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions