Determinism in the USSR, Part 2: Marx's evolution

The early idealist Marx eventually found himself at odds with Marx, the hard-nosed deterministic scientist.

It is a testament to the dominance of liberalism that Karl Marx, in modern popular discourse, is rarely spoken of as a scientist. A crank, or a secular mystic, or perhaps a sinister demagogue – but not a scientist. Bertrand Russell’s comments in his History of Western Philosophy are typical: in one passage, he writes that Marx merely “claimed to have made socialism scientific”; elsewhere, he compares Marx to “the Messiah” of an Abrahamic religion. Hughes, similarly, likens Marx to an “Old Testament prophet”; Durkheim, responding to Marx’s Capital, concludes that “Socialism is not a science…it is a cry of pain.”