The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (18731928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party.
The Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines by Alexander Bogdanov is a foundational work in early 20th-century Marxist philosophy and an accessible introduction to Bogdanov’s original thought. Written in 1911 and first published in 1913, this book captures Bogdanov at a pivotal moment between his development of empiriomonism—a radical empiricist alternative to contemporary Marxist materialism—and his later work Tektology, a precursor to systems theory and cybernetics.
His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (19046), 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 (191217), 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.
