¹ The term "historicism" is often used in such a broad sense that it is becoming difficult to make use of it at all. It will be used here in a limited sense, as applied to the intellectual movement which developed in Germany at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, in opposition to the conception of history as defended by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This historicism, historically determined, must be analysed by itself without confusing it with other movements, which subsequently grew out of it, in the general framework of Romanticism and historical positivist research.

² Cfr. H. Kohn, Panslavism, 1953; Nationalism, 1955; Teng and Fairbank, China's Response to the West, 1954.

³ Historicism only acquires its full meaning when it is opposed to the rationalist history of the 18th and the liberal history of the 19th century. The latter is history seen as progress, and it discards a whole sector of the history of mankind. Historicism expresses precisely the reaction to this: it wants to save everything because everything has meaning. In its extreme form, as in Ranke, it presupposes a hidden divine purpose; but Marx separates historicism from mysticism and at the same time saves history-as-progress from its super ficiality. The many enemies of the idea of meaning in history are opposed to both tendencies, but their criticism seems to touch rationalist history more than historicism, even if one considers both tendencies within the system of Marx.

⁴ One frequently reads that Lenin selected, from Marx's writings, justifications for actions of his own which in fact obeyed entirely different reasons. Would it not be better to suppose that Lenin had already found, noted and remembered these phrases that justified a policy which, he already knew, would be his if he ever succeeded in taking power? We would then be dealing with a reading of Marx—a universal reading which must be judged as a realization of Marxist theories.

⁵ The problems posed by the relations of Marxism to nationalism are there fore not solely historiographic: Austro-Marxism and Slav nationalism, Lenin and the republics of Ukraine and Turkestan, the Marxisation of Cuba, of Indonesia up to 1965, etc.; they are theoretical, and seem to arise from the role played by the concept of partial totality in Marx's system; depending on whether one identifies it with a class, or with a culture, one comes to either a liberal or a historicist version of Marx. The problem lies in determining how one can pass from one to the other, sometimes even without being fully aware of it.

⁶ The importance of L. Althusser's research comes from the fact that he rigorously draws all the conclusions implied in the position he initially adopts (epistemological cutting in Marx); but will his anti-historical principles allow him to answer this question: what is the historical determination of his own anti-historicism? And if this question is meaningless within the framework of what he has done, how can he discuss it with anyone else?

⁷ H. Kohn, Nationalism cit., Introduction.

⁸ J. Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism, Harper, New York, 1965, pp. 317-89. The author "regrets" what does not fit in with his conservative interpretation of historical materialism.

⁹ An example is G. Almond and B. Powell, Comparative Politics: A Develop mental Approach, Boston, Little Brown, 1966, pp. 50-72, 314-32. Several notions used by them are extremely obscure if one does not take them back of their Marxist origins.

¹⁰ I use the words "become bourgeois" to express the fact of adopting, or making a society adopt, the fundamental elements of universal bourgeois culture. The terms "to educate," "to develop," "to westernize," "to europeanize," do not seem appropriate because of the extra cultural connotations they contain, and particularly because they are sometimes used to justify the adoption of aspects of this Western bourgeois sub-culture which in reality many people in the Third World reject.

¹¹ Cf. B. Croce, Essays on Marx and Russia (F. Ungar, New York, 1966), chapter "on an equivocal historical concept, the bourgeoisie," in which there is constant confusion between universal bourgeois culture, and culture which is peculiar to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois class. In the end he sees no difference between the two concepts: bourgeoisie and modern times.

¹² The Marx interpreted in liberalist terms is broadly accepted and used in studies of the Third World. One could ask whether it is not playing the part played by legal Marxism in Russia.

¹³ If the problem is perceived despite everything, liberalism explodes, as can be seen in the writings of C. Wright Mills.

¹⁴ In the period 1870-1914, German culture probably owed its prestige to its irrational elements, which made it acceptable both to the developed countries of the West and to backward countries. Indeed, did not Thomas Mann see it as the expression of the struggle between Italian rationality and Slav irratio nality ?

¹⁵ The best description is still that of H. Marcuse, but it is external to its object, and in fact denies it all objective meaning.

¹⁶ Despite the great richness of the Trotskyist writings, it seems that the essential point is nevertheless an a-posteriori justification of liberalism.

¹⁷ There is an interesting example in G. Petrovic, Marxism in the Mid-twentieth Century, New York, Doubleday, 1967. The critique of Stalinism borders on humanism and epistemology, but only inasmuch as they are pro grammes.

¹⁸ Many of the results presented by certain historians as a verification of Marx's theories seem to be simple illustrations, and are easily criticized by the enemies of the "meaning of history" who do not find it very difficult to show them up as circular.

¹⁹ Lukács nowhere gives an exact historical qualification of the universal bour geois culture which he uses as a reference in his critical studies. This is why these studies often take on the character of "essays."