Dominique Lecourt – författare

When this book was first published in English in 1975, the previous forty years had seen the emergence of a new tradition in the philosophy of the sciences, or 'epistemology' in France. The founder of this tradition was Gaston Bachelard. Rather than elaborating from existing philosophy a series of categories to judge science's claims to truth, Bachelard started from the twentieth-century revolution in physics and critically examined existing philosophy on the basis of the achievements of this revolution and the scientific practice it exemplified. This critique of philosophy produced an epistemology radically different from traditional idealism and empiricism. Simultaneously, it opened the way to a new history of the sciences which had been developed by Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.This critique of empiricism and idealism in the name of science clearly parallels the theses of dialectical materialism. Hence a dialectical-materialist analysis illuminates both the achievements and limitations of the tradition. In this book Dominique Lecourt presents an exposition of Bachelard's epistemological writings and then offers a critique of that epistemology and of the works of Canguilhem and Foucault from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. In an introduction written especially for the English edition he compares Bachelard's positions with those of the different, but in some respects analogous, Anglo-Saxon traditions in epistemology descending from the works of Karl Popper, in particular with Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who died in 1976, symbolizes one of the most notorious yet obscure episodes in the history of the Soviet Union. Emerging from provincial shadows in the Ukraine during the twenties, Lysenko achieved a meteoric career under Stalin''s dictatorship, when ever greater claims were officially made for his ''environmentalism''. Overlord and autocrat of all Soviet biology after the Second World War, Lysenko''s doctrines were promulgated throughout the international communist movement - from Britain to Japan - as a specifically ''proletarian'' science, as opposed to mere bourgeois science. After Stalin''s death, Lysenko soon plunged into discredit - although his agricultural recipes were to be approved again by Khruschev.Dominique Lecourt - author of the highly successful study Marxism and Epistemology - poses the question: what was the historical meaning of Lysenko? Was Lysenko no more than a brutal charlatan? Or did his ideas correspond - not to any canon of science - but to wider social forces at work in the USSR? Lecourt''s sardonic and perceptive study provides a definitive critique of the follies of ''anti-Mendelian'' biology, and a materialist account of the reasons for its triumph in Russia during the rule of Stalin. An important afterword traces the original idea of a proletarian science to its source in Bogdanov.In a major introductory essay, Louis Althusser poses the acute political problems which the history of Lysenko still represents for Communists everywhere, and for the first time directly indicts political repression in the USSR today.

When this book was first published in English in 1975, the previous forty years had seen the emergence of a new tradition in the philosophy of the sciences, or ''epistemology'' in France. The founder of this tradition was Gaston Bachelard. Rather than elaborating from existing philosophy a series of categories to judge science''s claims to truth, Bachelard started from the twentieth-century revolution in physics and critically examined existing philosophy on the basis of the achievements of this revolution and the scientific practice it exemplified. This critique of philosophy produced an epistemology radically different from traditional idealism and empiricism. Simultaneously, it opened the way to a new history of the sciences which had been developed by Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.This critique of empiricism and idealism in the name of science clearly parallels the theses of dialectical materialism. Hence a dialectical-materialist analysis illuminates both the achievements and limitations of the tradition. In this book Dominique Lecourt presents an exposition of Bachelard''s epistemological writings and then offers a critique of that epistemology and of the works of Canguilhem and Foucault from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. In an introduction written especially for the English edition he compares Bachelard''s positions with those of the different, but in some respects analogous, Anglo-Saxon traditions in epistemology descending from the works of Karl Popper, in particular with Thomas Kuhn''s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Generating great controversy on its publication in France, The Mediocracy argues that a veritable counter-revolution in intellectual life has seen the period of the 'master thinkers' of the 1960s succeeded by an era of generalized mediocrity. Where Althusser or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida once held centre stage, today restorationist currents prevail in academia and on television. Fuelled by a complaisant media, contemporary French ideology seeks neither to interpret nor change the world, but is instead content to legitimise a globally hegemonic neo-liberalism.