This book written in 1908 as a militant and polemic text against certain Bolsheviks who had strayed from dialectical materialism into the jungle of “Machism” and associated idealist philosophies-serves today as an invaluable example of Lenin’s approach to philosophy and as a general exposition of dialectical materialism.
Lenin’s breadth of knowledge shines in this text: he discusses the Marxist theory of knowledge, critiques the idealists, from Berkeley to the then current schools, and examines the contemporary “crisis” in natural science induced by new discoveries about the nature of matter and its concomitant ramifications for scientific study and questions of epistemology.