Dialectical Materialism

Maurice Campbell Cornforth (1909-1980) was a British Marxist Philosopher. Cornforth’s multi-volume book ‘Dialectical Materialism’ was originally published in 1953. The text originated from a course of lectures that Cornforth delivered under auspices of the London District Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1950. This book consists of three volumes. The first volume, Materialism and Dialectics, provides a good introduction to several important sociological principles : idealism, metaphysics, materialism, mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism, in addition to Marxist Philosophy. Volume Two is entitled to Historical Materialism, i.e. on Marxist Philosophy that defines the principal concepts and summarises the basic law of development of the society, including the evolution of social superstructure on the economic basis. Volume Three is the ‘Theory of Knowledge’ that outlines the Marxist approach to some of the fundamental questions of Philosophy. However, in this book, the author has tried to confine himself to a straight-forward exposition of the said leading ideas of Marxism without burdening the exposition with digression into more technical questions on Philosophy.