58 SOCIAL SCIENTIST This has not been done in relation to Philosophical Notebooks^ though the passage quoted above gives enough indications of the reason. More explicit, in the opinion of this reviewer, is the following passage appearing in the preface to the 1961 edition of Lenin's Collected Works brought out by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow: A large number of the items included in Philosophical Notebooks relate to 1914-16. It is no coincidence that Lenin devoted so much attention to philosophy, and above all, to Marxist dialectics, precisely during the First World War, a period in which all the contradications of capitalism became extremely acute and a revolutionary crisis matured. Only materialist dialectics provided the basis for making a Marxist analysis of the contradictions of imperialism, revealing the imperialist character of First World War, exposing the opportunism and social chauvinism of the leaders of the Second International. Referring to the other major works of the period, including Imperialism, the author of the preface goes on, these "are inseparable from Philosophical Notebooks. In the creative elaboration of Marxist philosophy, the Marxist dialectical method and a profound scientific analysis of the new historical period were the basis for Lenin's great discoveries which equipped the proletariat with a new theory of social revolution, Philosophical Notebooks is inspired by a creative approach to Marxist philosophy, which is indissolubly bound up with reality, the struggle of the working class and the policy of the party". (P 14). Lenin could not, unfortunately, conclude but only start his work by way of jotting down some notes for subsequent elaboratian. What has been handed over to us, however, is enough to show that, as in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he was here dealing with philosophical questions as part of the class struggle in the theoretical field. The book that he was to have written, if completed, would have become the coping stone for the edifice that he was building up through his study of political economy, theory of state, the art and science of revolution and so on. As Lenin himself stated elsewhere in connection with Marx, dialectics was for him the method to study the concrete problems of the revolution in the light of development in social and natural sciences, and not an escape from them. Having substantiated his theory of imperialism, war, revolution, and so on, through a wealth of concrete data in Imperialism, State and Revolution and so