Lenin and World Revolution. By Stanley W Page. New York (New York University Press), 1959.
There is at present in the United States a whole school of historians and sociologists who are resorting more and more to psychology, if not indeed to the conception they have formed of psychoanalysis and of Freudianism, to ex-
"motivations" of the work and action of historic analyzed present book it is Lenin who is as it were "Psycho-
"a compulsive need to dominate fundamental leitmotiv": in order to explain
Its author. solemnly is the ego, formed and made sensitive in speci vs through ear v impressions. that selects trom :
indifferent and chaotic environment such challenges and stimuli as give it a crystalline structure of con-
"the demon-driven ego" of Lenin, 'intent upon dominating the processes of destruction and rebuilding, that explains the "revolutionary fanaticism" of his work and his action.
To be reviewed in our next issue.
The author, specialized for the American army in studies of Russian — and especially Soviet - history, has proposed "to remove Leninism from the realm of the scientific and indisputable and to open upon it the floodgates of free critical evaluation."
A reading of this book, however, gives evidence rather of the fatal weaknesses of its psychological method for xplaining mass phenomena like the Russian Revolution ind the Leninist communist current, thar of the objective reasons, independently of any personal "motivation,' the striking success recorded by these phenomena.
The balance sheet of the "free critical evaluation" of the book and its method is, under these conditions,
"psychological researches" disappointing. By orienting ward the intellectuals in the service of the Pentagon, one might perhaps learn better what "inner demon" tellectuals obey that they want to write their
Neros of the World Workers'
Movement and of the International