Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich (1870–1924)

Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, wrote mainly about politics and economics, but as a Marxist of his generation he assumed that ideas about society needed to rest on sound philosophical premises. He was a militant atheist. He also regarded any other version of ‘materialism’ than his own as being a perversion of Marxism. Initially his works proposed an epistemology based on a crude analogy with photography. But in the First World War he revised his ideas after studying Hegel, and began to emphasize provisionality in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless he never disowned his earlier writings. And after his death his confused philosophical oeuvre retained axiomatic status in Marxism-Leninism.