SOURCE: "Between Fantasy and Reality: Lenin as a Philosopher and a Social Scientist," in Lenin and Leninism: State, Law, and Society, edited by Bernard W. Eissenstat, Lexington Books, 1971, pp. 59-79.

In the following essay, Feuer argues that Lenin's philosophical beliefs vacillated between sober materialism and Utopian fantasy.

"'We ought to dream!' I wrote these words and got scared," Lenin said in his famous factional pamphlet What Is to Be Done? published in 1902. He dreamed of a centralized revolutionary organization in which "Social-Democratic Zheliabovs" would emerge; then he would dare say, a socialist Archimedes moving the social universe with an organizational lever: '"Give us an organization of revolutionists, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!'" But inevitably, he wondered whether "a Marxist has any right at all to dream." Was his dream a fantasy like that which had moved Zheliabov to assassinate a czar? Was...