A Generation Enlightened by War: (Philosophers of the Soviet 1960s)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt at a socio-genealogical analysis of the “philosophers of the sixties.” This is how recent literature has described the generation of young philosophers in the 1950s–1960s who opposed themselves to their dogmatically ossified professors and actively contributed to the de-Stalinization of public consciousness. The main focus is on yesterday’s front-line officers, those of them who returned from the front and entered philosophy, above all Evald V. Ilyenkov and Alexander A. Zinoviev, who initiated debates over philosophy as a topic at the Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Faculty of Philosophy in 1954. The author sees this as a bold and rather successful attempt at philosophical reformation of Marxism. Two years before the Twentieth Party Congress called for the restoration of Leninist norms of living, the “sixties philosophers” called for a revival of Marxian norms of thinking. Then we consider the original understandings of thinking and consciousness that appeared in Soviet philosophy in the 1960s–early 1970s and that were sometimes neo-Marxist in character.