Current Moscow Time: 18:05:4425 May 2013
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Suppressed Testament of Lenin - pt. 4
Author: Leon Trotsky
Website: RL Online
Department:
Page: 4 ( 15) pages
Summary: On Lenin's Testament
On Lenin's Testament
By LEON TROTSKY
The postwar epoch has brought into wide currency the psychological biography, the masters of which art often pull their subject up out of society by the roots. The fundamental driving force of history is presented as the abstraction, personality. The behavior of the "political animal," as Aristotle brilliantly defined mankind, is resolved into personal passions and instincts.
The that personality is abstract may seem absurd. Are not the super-personal forces of history really the abstract things? And what can be more concrete than a living man? However, we insist upon our statement. If you remove from a personality, even the most richly endowed, the content which is introduced into it by the milieu, the nation, the epoch, the class, the group, the family, there remains an empty automaton, a psyche-physical robot, an object of natural, but not of social or "humane," science.
The causes of this abandonment of history and society must, as always, be sought in history and society. Two decades of wars, revolutions and crises have given a bad shake-up to that sovereign, human personality. To have weight in the scales of contemporary history a thing must be measured in millions. For this, the offended personality seeks revenge. Unable to cope with society on the rampage, it turns its back upon society. Unable to explain itself by means of historic processes, it tries to explain history from within itself. Thus the Indian philosophers built universal systems by contemplating their own navels.