- Title
- The dilemma of freedom of conscience: Lenin on religion, the national question and the Bund
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- New Politics Vol. 14, Issue 2, p. 61-69
- Relation
- http://newpol.org/content/dilemma-freedom-conscience-lenin-religion-national-question-and-bund
- Publisher
- New Politics Associates
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Lenin’s name is not one usually associated with freedom of conscience. Was he not the doctrinaire sectarian who brooked no difference of opinion? Did he not trample over his own convictions in the callous quest for power? Careful consideration of his texts reveals a very different picture, one in which he struggles to articulate a radical freedom of conscience. The problem for many readers in our context is that freedom of conscience is automatically associated with a liberal agenda, predicated on the "rights" of the sacrosanct private individual. Lenin and those around him attempted to articulate freedom of conscience in a rather different fashion, asking whether it might be possible to delink freedom of conscience from the liberal project. How might it be rethought from very different, collective situation? I explore this question in three instances, concerning religion, the national question and relations between the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and the Bund, or the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Here we find that Lenin struggles with the question of freedom of conscience, occasionally glimpsing a more radical, dialectical form only to fall short once again. Indeed, it seems that those around him pushed the internal logic of his arguments to their natural conclusion. In many respects, the project of a radically collective freedom of conscience remains an unfinished project.
- Subject
- Lenin; religion; the Bund
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340818
- Identifier
- uon:28584
- Identifier
- ISSN:0028-6494
- Language
- eng
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