Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

For no good reason today I look at an  ambitious work with the name Josef Stalin on the title page,  “Marxism and the problems of linguistics” (1950).  There was a theory among Soviet linguists at the time that all languages can be traced to a single primordial language, and that their job was to suss out what THAT proto-language must have sounded like. This was called the Japhetic theory or “linguistic paleontology.” The advocates of this theory thought they were well within Marxist traditions — developing a dialectical view of the history of language. They also adapted their theories to the terminology of classical Marxist theory. Marx had written of the ownership and control of the means of society as the "substructure" of history and of culture as a "superstructure," suggesting something epiphenomenal.  The Japhetic theorists, accommodating their views to this, discussed language too as part of the "superstructure," that is, because the multiplicity of...

In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books I discovered the following. George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald exchanged letters in December 1946 about the meaning of Orwell's fable, Animal Farm. Macdonald wrote that some people have been citing the book as an argument that revolutions always end badly, "hence to hell with it and hail the status quo." Macdonald himself didn't take the book as having any such broad a meaning, he took it as specifically applying to the history of Russia and the failure of its revolution. But he had been surprised by the prevalence of the other view and was asking Orwell for guidance. Orwell replied:   "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a      wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant...