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Lenin on democratic theory

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Abstract

Lenin’s State and Revolution is not only a project for imminent revolutionary policy and not only a legitimization argument for a revolutionary dictatorship, but also a theory of state and theory of democracy. Lenin points at the reduplication of state organs that is inherent in a democratic state. While the Russian revolutionary thinks of this reduplication as something transitory, we today increasingly see it as a durable condition coterminous with the late-modern democratic state. I use Lenin’s treatise as a point of inspiration to briefly characterize my dialectical theory of state.

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Correspondence to Artemy Magun.

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Research for this article was supported by the grant for the Foundation for Support of Liberal Arts at the Center for Historical Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg in 2017-8.

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Magun, A. Lenin on democratic theory. Stud East Eur Thought 70, 141–152 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9309-1

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