Content area
Full Text
LI DA AND MARXIST PHILOSOPHY IN CHINA. By Nick Knight. Boulder (Colorado): Westview Press. 1996. x, 326 pp. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8133-8993-3.
STUDENTS OF CHINESE COMMUNISM will likely welcome the publication of this work by the Australian Nick Knight as a veritable event. One comes away from reading it wondering how it happened that the historical role of China's paramount Marxist thinker Li Da (1890-1966) should have been overlooked for so long, at least outside China, where his numerous publications received the final accolade of a four-volume edition of Collected Works in the 1980s. Li Da, whom Mao humbly acknowledged as his teacher, whose Elements of Sociology he hailed as the first Marxist textbook and claimed to have read ten times, and Elements of Economics three and a half times, has so far received little more than passing mention, and this chiefly for the reason that he was one of the twelve founding apostles of the Chinese Communist Party. Li Da's early translations of Marxist luminaries Karl Kautsky and Hermann Gorter served as study materials in the Marxist circle founded by Li Dazhao in 1918. Yet, in his Li Dazhao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism Maurice Meisner makes no mention of him. Arif Dirlik who, in his remarkable...