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Locke, John (1632-1704)
English materialist philosophy of the period of the Restoration; developed a materialist theory of knowledge which opposed Descartes' "innate ideas" and declared experience to be the sole source of all ideas, - but via the influence of external objects on the sense organs (ideas of sensation) or alternatively through attention being directed to the activity of the soul (ideas of Reflection); developed theory of the State, including the proposition that people should change the social system if it does not provide people with the proper opportunity for education and development.
John Locke was an active participant in the political struggles of the Restoration, Whigs vs. Tories and Catholic vs. Protestant, eventually leading a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and to a relatively stable system of government in which Church was separated from the State and the monarchy placated the people and left the business of government largely to the Parliament.
On the Nature of Human Understanding was written in 1689, about the time Newton began his work on mechanics, providing an almost comprehensive mechanical view of the Universe, and in the wake of the Revolution of 1688, which removed the Catholic absolutist James II, and replaced him with William III, Prince of Orange, consolidating the bourgeois form of government established by the Restoration after the English Civil War.
Locke was philosopher, economist and political theorist, and his philosophical work was used in the pursuit of political struggles. He advocated the division of power between legislative, executive and "federative" powers. He advocated the right and obligation of the People to change the government, if it did not provide opportunities for education.
Locke developed a materialist theory of knowledge which opposed Descartes' "innate ideas" and declared experience to be the sole source of all ideas, via the influence of external objects on the sense organs (ideas of sensation) or alternatively through attention being directed to the activity of the soul (ideas of reflection).
Locke continues the line of empiricism developed by Bacon and Hobbes. Newton's mechanical philosophy and Locke's empiricism are the subject of Berkeley's idealist attack in Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710.
See John Locke Reference Archive.
Lockhart, Robert Hamilton Bruce (1887-1970)
British agent in Russia. Born in Fife, son of a schoolmaster. Joined the diplomatic service in 1911; British Vice-Consul in Moscow from 1912. Sent away from Moscow in early 1917 after complaints from his wife about his behaviour, but returned in January 1918 at the head of a special mission to establish unofficial contact with the Soviet Government.
Though extremely hostile to the Soviet government, he opposed intervention as he considered it unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless he acted as a faithful servant of the British government both before and after British troops invaded the port of Archangel. Arrested by the Bolsheviks in September 1918, he was released the following month in exchange for Litvinov, his Soviet opposite in Britain.
Lockhart was the British representative in Prague until 1922 when he announced his conversion to Catholicism and began to work for a bank travelling round Europe. In 1929 became editor of 'Londoner's Diary' in the Evening Standard, Joined the Political Intelligence Section of the Foreign Office in 1939 and became Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in charge of propaganda in enemy countries. Author of Memoirs of a British Agent (1933), an account of his activities in Russia, and of diaries from 1915 to 1933 (published in 1973).
Lomov (Oppokov), Georgy (1888-1938)
He advocated for Lenin's position prior to Lenin's return to Petrograd in 1917. After the Revolution, he became Commissar for Justice in the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). He was also a member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee and the Supreme Council of National Economy (Vesenkha). When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was finally signed he, along with Bukharin, Bubnov and Uritsky, resigned all his government and party posts. In the 1920s, Oppokov became for a time a member of the Left Opposition. Like most prominent Bolshevik leaders of 1917 he was arrested in June 1937 during the Great Purges. He was sentenced to death and shot on 30 December 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
See Georgy Oppokov (Lomov) Archive.
London, Jack (1876-1916)
American novelist and popular socialist.
London was an illegitimate child, and spent his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. He became the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. His years in the Klondike searching for gold left their mark in his best short stories; among them, The Call of the Wild, and White Fang. His best novel, The Sea-Wolf, was based on his experiences at sea. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. London was a socialist and supporter of the workers movement, but like many socialists of his time, especially in the “settler nations,” he was prone to racism and was a populist rather than a communist. He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases and drug treatments.
See Jack London Archive.
Longuet, Charles (1833-1901)
French journalist, Proudhonist. Married to Marx's eldest daughter, Jenny Marx-Longuet. Delegate to the Lausanne Congress of the First International (1867); member of the Commune and editor of its official organ; after the fall of the Commune he fled to London. In 1880 he returned to France and was elected a member of the Paris City Council. Longuet worked on the editorial staff of the radical paper La Justice.
Longuet, Charles (1873-1874)
Son of Charles and Jenny Longuet.
Longuet, Edgar (1879-1950)
Son of Charles and Jenny Longuet. French socialist.
Longuet, Felicitas
Mother of Charles Longuet.
Longuet, Henri (Harry) (1878-1883)
Son of Jenny and Charles Longuet.
Longuet, Jean-Laurent-Frederick (Johnny) (1876-1938)
Son of Charles and Jenny Longuet. French lawyer and Socialist who in the First World War held a pacifist position but invariably voted for war credits. Founder and editor of the newspaper Le Populaire. At the Strasbourg Congress in 1918 his policy was adopted by the majority of the French Socialist Party. After the Tours Congress of 1920 where the communists gained the majority he supported the minority and joined the centrist Two-and-a-half International.
See Jean Longuet Archive.
Longuet, Jenny Marx (Jennychen) (1844-1883)
Marx's daughter, married to Charles Longuet.
See also the Jenny Longuet Archive.
Longuet, Jenny (1882-1952)
Daughter of Jenny and Charles Longuet.
Longuet, Marcel (1881-1949)
Son of Jenny and Charles Longuet.
Lorenz, Konrad (1903-1989)
Austrian zoologist, founder of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour. His ideas contributed to linking behavioural patterns to an evolutionary past, and known for his work on the roots of aggression. In the 1960s, along with Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, his animal stories were popularised to prove that human beings were basically animals and capitalist society no more than the expression of their animal nature.
The son of a surgeon, Lorenz showed an interest in animals at an early age, caring for sick animals from a nearby Zoo and keeping records of bird behaviour in a diary. He studied medicine for two semesters at Columbia University, before returning to study in Vienna, but all throughout, he maintained his detailed observations of animal behaviour. He was awarded a PhD in zoology in 1933. He established colonies of birds on his estate to facilitate his studies, and the observations he published soon gained him an international reputation. In 1935, he described imprinting behaviour, in which ducklings learn to follow their real or foster parents, Lorenz causing much amusement with the ducklings that had adopted him as their parents.
In 1936, Lorenz founded the German Society for Animal Psychology, and in 1937, he was appointed lecturer in comparative anatomy and animal psychology at the University of Vienna.
From 1942 to 1944 he served as a physician in the German army and was a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. He was returned to Austria in 1948 and headed the Institute of Comparative Ethology at Altenberg from 1949 to 1951. In 1950 he established a comparative ethology department in the Max Planck Institute. From 1961 to 1973 he served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Behaviour Physiology, in Seewiesen, and in 1973, together with Frisch and Tinbergen, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning animal behavioural patterns.
Lorenz's work centred on the identification of behavioural patterns that are evolved and inherited by individuals of a species in the same way that anatomical features are inherited, and how specific drives are associated with each behavioural pattern and activate it in response to given stimuli or even autonomously (a cat needs to chase mice, even when it's not hungry). He also studied how animals respond when conflicting basic drives are activated, putting the animal in a kind of quandry, which makes the action of the drive and the associated behaviour particularly graphic.
Lorenz applied his ideas to the behaviour of humans, with controversial philosophical and sociological implications. In a popular book, On Aggression (1963), he argued that fighting and warlike behaviour in man are innate drives. While fighting in lower animals has a positive survival function, he observed, such as the dispersion of competitors and the maintenance of territory, war-like tendencies in humans needed to be ritualised into socially harmless or useful behaviour patterns (like sporting competitiveness). In another work, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (1973), Lorenz examined the nature of human thought and intelligence and attributed the problems of modern civilisation to the way in which basic drives were being frustrated or manifested in anti-social directions by the conditions of modern life.
Loriot, Fernand (1870-1932)
French socialist who helped found the CP, became an Oppositionist in 1925 and a member of the editorial board of Contre le Courant at the end of 1927. A year later he broke with communism and joined the Revolution proletarienne group.
Lorulot, André (1885-1963)
Individualist anarchist and free-thinker, Lorulot began writing for Libertad’s journal “l’anarchie” in 1905. After a period on an anarchist commune, and a prison sentence for encouraging disobedience by soldiers, Lorulot founded and edited the magazine “L’Idée Libre” in December 1911. The magazine developed into a combination propaganda organ for individualism and anti-clericalism, and in 1958 Lorulot became president of the Federation of Free Thinkers. A prolific writer, his misanthropy is perhaps best expressed by the title of his 1939 pamplhet: “Les Hommes me Dégoutent:” “Men Disgust Me.”
See Lorulot Archive.
Lozovsky, Solomon (Alexandr) (1878-1952)
Born Samuil Abramovich Dridzo in Danilovka, Ukraine, Lozovsky first joined the Bolsheviks in 1901. He was expelled from the R.S.D.L.P in 1914 and, again, in 1917. After his second expulsion, he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Revolutionary Party (Internationalist) until returning to the R.S.D.L.P. in December of 1919.
During his lifetime he held several prominent positions in the Party, the Soviet Union and the international communist movement: General Secretary of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern), 1921-1937; Soviet deputy minister of foreign affairs, 1939-1946; member of ECCI Presidium, 1926-1935; candidate member of EECI Politsecretariat, 1926-1927, 1929-1935; candidate member of EECI Presidium, 1935-1943.
During the Second World War, Lozovsky supervised all the anti-fascist committees (including the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee) as vice-chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo). The purpose of the anti-fascist committees was to supply Western media with reports of Nazi atrocities and thereby influence public opinion in support of the Soviet Union.
Despite being approved during the war, their activities were later viewed as promoting “bourgeois nationalism” — a treasonable offense.
On January 26, 1949 Lozovsky was arrested. He was tried, found guilty and shot in 1952. During the trial, Lozovsky maintained his innocence and vigorously defended his actions.
He was “rehabilitated” in 1956.
Further Reading: Lozovsky Internet Archive
Louis, Paul (1872-1948)
French journalist and author of books on labor history. Member of the small centrist group, the Party of Proletarian Unity.
Lovestone, Jay (1898- )
Leader of the American Communist Party who supervised the expulsion of Trotsky's supporters in 1928. Lovestone himself was expelled on orders of Stalin in 1929 because of his sympathy for the Right Opposition. Lovestone organized an independent group that existed until World War II; he later became cold-war adviser on foreign affairs for AFL-CIO president, George Meany.
Louzon, Robert (1882- )
Syndicalist who belonged briefly to the French CP in the 1920s and left it with Pierre Monatte to found La Revolution proletarienne and the Syndicalist League.
Lowe, Adolph (1893-1995)
Adolph Lowe (born Adolf Löwe) was for a long time the eminence grise of the New School for Social Research founded in 1918 in New York. A veteran of World War I, Lowe helped plan the postwar demobilization of the German army, and served in the Socialization Committee which sought to nationalize the German economy. In 1922, Lowe joined the Ministry of Economics of the Weimar Republic.
In 1926, Lowe joined the Kiel Institute of World Economics, a center dedicated to business cycle research whose other members included Fritz Burchardt, Gerhard Colm, Jacob Marschak and Hans Neisser. In 1926 he published a critique of the existing division between business cycle literature and equilibrium economic theory, and called for the development of a specialised theory of economic fluctuations.
Drawing on Marx’s scheme of extended reproduction, Lowe found a new manner of conceiving motion in business cycle theory. Lowe’s concern with changing multisectoral structure over the cycle, as outlined in his 1926 essay, preceded and inspired a similar notion in the young Friedrich Hayek’s business cycle theory. Lowe’s own subsequent work, in particular the analysis of the “traverse” from one growth equilibrium to another (1952, 1954, 1976), has its roots in this paper.
Lowe gravitated to the University of Frankfurt in 1931 where he came into fruitful contact with Horkheimer, Adorno and other members of the “Frankfurt School” — an influence that never left him. As a cosmopolitan, social democrat, ex-member of the German Socialization Committee and an architect of the Weimar Republic, Adolph Lowe’s position in Nazi-controlled Germany was quite untenable and he was one of the first to be removed. He left in 1933 to take up a position at the University of Manchester. Lowe left England in 1940, being perceived as an “enemy alien” — in spite of his naturalization and past history. His Price of Liberty (1936) outlines some of his impressions of Great Britain.
During his stay at Frankfurt and Manchester, Lowe moved away from business cycle research he had pursued at Kiel and towards social philosophy and economic methodology. His famous 1935 Economics and Sociology, was a “plea for cooperation in the social sciences,” criticising notions of mechanistic rationality and the assumption of the constancy and uniformity of individual behavior.
Lowe arrived at the New School for Social Research as the director of the “Institute of World Affairs” — that institution’s attempt to resurrect the old Kiel Institute. His indefatigable efforts in this regard led him to temporarily suspend his work on economic methodology and social structure.
His 1951 article attacking the “mechanistic approach” to economics signalled his return to this field. His pre-war questions began to take a more definite form around this time — namely, in two issues which dominated the rest of his career, the “economic traverse” and “instrumental analysis”. Underlying both of these concepts was the recognition of changing and heterogeneous behavioral patterns — the crux of Lowe’s pre-war musings. If this is granted, then the approach of orthodox economic theory practically irrelevant as the object of study was continuously changing. As noted, the analysis of the “traverse”, already contained in his Kiel work, but only really formulated in the 1950s (e.g. 1952, 1954, 1955), addressed the issue of movements from a particular growth path to another and the detailing of the implied adjustment paths and the modifications in behavioral and economic structures which both engender and are implied by them. Thus, the dynamics behind the traverse, he envisioned to be related to socio-economic evolution which should not, indeed could not, be considered an exclusively economic phenomenon. He continued developing his ideas on the relationship between evolution and growth, in particular, outlining the role of changing behavior and multiple behavior patterns on the resulting economic process. His position is perhaps best outlined in his masterful and inspiring On Economic Knowledge (1965).
Lowe “retired” in 1963, remaining at the New School as a lecturer, until he returned to Germany in 1983. Lowe died at the age of 102.
Lowenthal, Leo (1900-1993)
Lowenthal was born in Frankfurt in 1900, the son of assimilated Jews (his father was a physician), and he came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. He jointed the newly founded Institute in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis, and predominantly Jewish, the Institute’s members swiftly fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. After a year in Geneva, they settled in New York, where Columbia University gave them shelter. Lowenthal maintained a close relationship with his colleagues, even during the war when several of them moved to California and he began to work with the Office of War Information in Washington. Although Horkheimer, Adorno, and Friedrich Pollock returned to Frankfurt to reestablish the Institute after the war, Lowenthal, like former members Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Erich Fromm, chose to remain in the United States. After seven years as research director of the Voice of America, and another seven years at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, he joined the Berkeley Speech Department in 1956 and shortly thereafter the Department of Sociology. Although officially retiring in 1968, Lowenthal remained vigorously active in departmental and University affairs until virtually the end of his life. From 1968 to 1972, he served on the Budget Committee, and in 1973-74, chaired the Sociology Department.
The celebrated private seminar he conducted with graduate students interested in the sociology of literature was launched during the student strike of 1970 and continued to meet through the last months of 1992. As two of its participants, Jim Stockinger and Terry Strathman, remember it, the seminar produced a remarkable “cross-generational dialogue,” whose focus on literature “was particularly liberating” for sociologists unaccustomed to literary analysis. “Good wine, cheese, hearty and spirited debate and a large dose of German conviviality,” they recalled, “made these evenings unforgettable experiences.”
Lowenthal's publications were collected during the 1980s, both in German, by the Suhrkamp Verlag, and in English, by Transaction Press. Most notable among them were Prophets of Deceit (written with Norbert Guterman in 1949), Literature and the Image of Man (1957) and Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (1961). Also included were his early writings on Jewish themes and his last ruminations on postmodernism, against whose dangers he warned. His autobiographical reflections, including fascinating conversations with the German sociologist Helmut Dubiel, were published by the University of California as An Unmastered Past in 1987. The extensive interviews he gave in 1989 to another German interlocutor, Frithjof Hager, dealt with postmodernism and other contemporary themes; they stimulated a collection of responses by European and American scholars published in honor of his ninetieth birthday as Geschichte Denken: Ein Notizbuch für Leo Lowenthal by the Reclam Verlag of Leipzig. For his eightieth, he had been the recipient of a Festschrift of celebratory essays in the journal Telos.
In the last decade of his life, Lowenthal was richly honored on both sides of the Atlantic. Awarded the Berkeley Citation and the Federal Republic of Germany's Distinguished Merit Cross in 1985, he also received honorary doctorates from the University of Siegen, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Hamburg. Further, he was given the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Medal and Adorno Prize, as well as a year at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 1985, the first full-length appreciation of his work was published by Michael Kausch as Erziehung und Unterhaltung: Leo Lowenthals Theorie der Massenkommunikation.
As the final survivor of the Frankfurt School’s inner circle, he achieved international recognition as a symbol of its remarkable collective achievement.
Lowenthal’s training in collaborative scholarship and his broad humanistic learning allowed him to play a leading role both in the institutional and intellectual life of the campus as a whole. An early supporter of the Free Speech Movement, but troubled by the excesses that followed, he was a leading member of the faculty committee chaired by Charles Muscatine that produced the widely admired report published as Education at Berkeley.
Lowenthal displayed an extraordinary ability to maintain close friendships with scholars in disparate fields and begin new ones with members of very different generations. He remained a vital presence long after his active teaching days were over. His quick, often acerbic wit, uncanny shrewdness in judging – and gleefully gossiping about – people, and manifest zest for living life fully never deserted him. Nor did his intransigent refusal to abandon the long-cherished ideals of his youth, even as he soberly acknowledged the improbability of their ever being realized. Ruthlessly unsentimental and impatient with cant of any kind, he nonetheless refused to succumb to the sour cynicism of those who turn into the deadly adults Horkheimer and Adorno warned against.
From In Memoriam for Lowenthal.