Abstract

Lenin described the three sources and chief component parts of Marxism as German idealist philosophy, British political economy and French Utopian Socialist thought. In this he was only reiterating and systematizing the many acknowledgements by Marx and (especially) Engels of their debts to their predecessors. Curiously, and no doubt inevitably, however, this piety took the form of negation, and not in the Hegelian sense of cancellation-transcendence-preservation. During the Kautskyist and Stalinist periods the component study of Marxism, and the representatives and symbols of those sources — including Utopianism — were anathematized. Marxism was said to have progressed from Utopia to science, to have rationalized the irrational elements in all prior systems.