The ‘Hour of Methodology’

Abstract

‘One of the first problems ... I would call the problem of the possible and the actual in social development. However strange it may seem, these categories of dialectical materialism have least of all been studied on an historical basis. This can only be seen as one of the residues of the ideology of the cult of the personality. I have in mind Stalin’s “straightening out” of history according to its outcome, his canonization of a given course of events as the only possible one, and his effec- tive substitution of a Marxist determinism by the fatalistic inevitability of events (which incidentally, in recent times, has justified all his mistakes and what were more than mistakes - his crimes).