Acknowledgements
In researching and writing this book I have accrued debts to many individuals and institutions. George Fischer, Michael E. Brown, Teru Kanazawa, and especially Raya Dunayevskaya each commented extensively on it during the years 1979–83, when I completed the first version, a dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate school. Dunayevskaya also occasionally discussed it with me in Chicago until her death in 1987. It was she who originally proposed the topic to me and who encouraged me to work on it further. During its thesis stage, David Beasley of the New York Public Library helped me greatly in locating source material. At the same time I received, with the assistance of George Fischer, a CUNY/Board of Higher Education research grant for an uninterrupted year of dissertation work, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) generously provided me with a summer scholarship to study German in West Berlin.
After 1983, as I worked further on the book, librarians at the several universities where I taught – at Indiana University Northwest, at North Central College, and especially Robert Ridinger at Northern Illinois University – spared no effort to make a large number of French, German, Italian, and Japanese materials available to me through interlibrary loan.
In the 1990s, after I had reworked the entire manuscript, adding material on Hegel and on German, French, and Italian Marxist traditions, as well as new source material on Lenin, a number of people read and commented on it once again. Robert John Ackermann, Janet Afary, Peter Hudis, and Douglas Kellner read the manuscript in its entirety. Large portions of the manuscript involving several chapters were read by Bud Burkhard, Nigel Gibson, Martin Jay, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, David Joravsky, Andrew Kliman, Pierre Lantz, Heinz Osterle, Albert Resis, Tom Rockmore, and Lou Turner. Finally, Paul Buhle, Olga Domanski, Ted McGlone, Robert Service, Jim Thomas, and Alan Wald each read smaller parts. I am most grateful to each of these readers for their comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank my editor at the University of Illinois Press, Richard Martin, who has been most helpful and supportive during the review process.
An earlier version of Chapter 7 appeared in 1992 as an article in Studies in Soviet Thought (44: 79–129; © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers; printed in the Netherlands), and I would like to thank Kluwer Academic Publishers for allowing this material to be reprinted.