Few topics in the world history of political philosophy are more paradoxical than that of the present chapter. On the one hand, it is difficult to find a theory that contains the three meanings of political philosophy distinguished in this book more explicitly than the Leninist brand of Marxism. Marxism–Leninism contains a clear, albeit reductionist, theory of the state, as well as an elaborate theory of revolutionary politics and party organisation. It also contains a clear philosophy of the political, explaining it, in the final analysis, in terms of class struggle. Finally, it contains a clear theory of the way in which philosophy can, and indeed must, itself be a political weapon. The truth contained in the Soviet claim that Marxism–Leninism was the only true and fully consistent continuation of the Marxist legacy is that, in order to offer a ‘true and fully consistent continuation’ of any philosophical legacy, one has to simplify and dogmatise it.

On the other hand, these three meanings of political philosophy all vanished from Marxism(–Leninism) once it became the Legitimationswissenschaft of the new regime (Negt 1974: 7–22). The way in which the nascent Soviet order was framed as an application of Marxist theory excluded legitimate application of the critical potential of Marxist theory on that order itself. A theory of state and politics was rendered obsolete, as a matter of principle, by the dogma of the ‘withering away’ of the state that was implied in the long-term goal of a communist, self-determining society beyond class (Hoffman 1992). Practically, this was effected by the replacement of politics by bureaucratic public administration in a society guided by the Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza (KPSS, Communist Party of the Soviet Union).