World History as Revolution: Boris Porshnev and the Experience of Dialectical Defeat

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive presentation of the most remarkable engagement with the intellectual genre of world history in the Soviet era -the hitherto unknown project Critique of Human History by the famous Soviet Marxist thinker Boris Porshnev. Porshnev's synthesis of negative dialectics and historical materialism transposed the negativity 1 I am grateful to Ivana Bago for her much needed editorial help at the crucial moment of writing.