On the Role of Popularizing Scientific Knowledge in Alexander Bogdanov’s Socio-Political Activity

Abstract

The article discusses the conditions under which the views of the philosopher, economist, physician, and science fiction author Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov (1873–1928) was formed and analyzes the evolution of his ideas and his social activity in the sphere of political, practical, and cultural changes of Russian society. The focus of the present study is on the last years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century—the period when Bogdanov was most active as a revolutionary, marking at the same time the beginning of the heyday of his creative work in science and philosophy, including the so-called Tula and Vologda phases of his banishment. During the latter, his political activity was at its peak, and it was then that his views—including the concepts of “proletarian education” (or “enlightenment”) and “socialism in the present”—had essentially taken their final shape that was preserved and maintained through the subsequent decade.