The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy and the Stalinization of British Communism 1928-1933
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4163238 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Mcilroy (Keele University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 192 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 187-230 |
| Publication date | 2006-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gtj011 |
| OpenAlex | W1509894332 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In January 1930 W. N. Ewer, the foreign editor of the Daily Herald, explained the thinking behind his recent defection from the British Communist Party (CPGB). The method of the Communist International (Comintern) and the CPGB, he argued, had little in common with the method of Karl Marx. Contemporary Communists appealed to authority immune to refutation, not to critical analysis of observable phenomena. In contrast, conscientious followers of Marx rejected authority, submitted every verdict to questioning and discarded theories which did not accord with rigorous examination of the evidence. CPGB members, he insisted, addressing the party’s intellectuals, rejected empirical data which clashed with the party line: That ‘line’, authoritatively laid down, is for you a fixed thing to which thinking must conform. If one’s observation of the phenomena suggests conclusions varying by a hair’s breadth from ‘the line’, then to you it is certain that either observation must have been inaccurate or deduction false: for ‘the line’ is absolute in its rectitude. The general propositions of which ‘the line’ consists are, at any given moment, unquestionable, axiomatic and rigid. From them are deduced more particular propositions, which, in their turn, become equally unquestionable, equally axiomatic, equally rigid.1
Archaeology · Communism · Orthodoxy · Political science · Aging, Elder Care, and Social Issues · Geology · Health, Medicine and Society · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2021 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |