We often get questions about HM series and its expensive hardbacks. Yes, those are expensive and are meant for library collections – please reach out to your libraries for a subscription. For non-library readers, HM series has an agreement with Haymarket Books to release a paperback version – all our volumes will eventually be available in paperbacks. You can purchase Volume 8 – The Philosophy of Living Experience – here for around $20.

 

The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (1904–6), a philosophy of radical empiricism that he developed to replace what he considered to be the crude materialism of contemporary Marxists, and Tektology: Universal Organisational Science (1912–17), a precursor of cybernetics and systems theory.

The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913) was written at a transitional point between the two; it is a final summing up of empiriomonism, an illustration of his theory of the social genesis of ideas, and an anticipation of Tektology.

• Part of the Historical Materialism series