---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 6:18 PM Subject: [NetworkedLabour] How important was Alexander Bogdanov? To: "<[email protected]>" < [email protected]> David G. Rowley. Review of Biggart, John; Dudley, Peter; King, Francis, eds., Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems inking in Russia and Biggart, John; Glovelli, Georgii; Yassour, Avraham, Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928. H-Russia, H-Net Reviews. May, 2000. URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4154 Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) – scientist, philoso- pher, economist, physician, novelist, poet, and Marxist revolutionary – is mostly ignored by general histories of Europe and Russia and generally appears only as a minor character in the more specialized works of Russian phi- losophy and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. Yet it seems that no one who becomes familiar with his work fails to be uerly impressed by it. Most Bogdanov scholars believe him to be one of the most creative and profound European thinkers of his age. Bogdanov was an original philosopher who at- tempted to reconstruct Marxism upon a modern epis- temological footing (replacing Plekhanov’s correspon- dence theory of knowledge with a sophisticated rein- terpretation of Ernst Mach’s Empiriocriticism).[1] His conception of the role that culture would play in build- ing Communism bears a striking resemblance to Anto- nio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony.[2] Most im- portantly of all, in his Tektology: Universal Organization Science, Bogdanov ambitiously proposed that all physi- cal, biological, and human sciences could be unified by treating them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. His work anticipated in many important ways Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Gen- eral Systems eory.[3] _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/