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No, it totally ignores my world view. Marxism-Leninism was the biggest event in philosophy, since Aristotle and I think it deserves at least small chapter in "authoritative" encyclopedia :-)



I'd argue that Marxism is tangential to philosophy proper.

It has more to do with political economy than dialectical materialism. If you want that, you should read Hegel.


There's a big article on the man himself, and it's written by someone whom I know to be have a fair amount of expertise in related topics.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

It seems that SEP's policy is to have articles on either people or topics, but not topics named after people.


If that’s the case, it assumes that the topic named after a person can be learned by learning about the person. However, this is not true in many cases where the topic arose later than the person itself (like, for instance, Christianity), or where the person explicitly disclaimed the topic from having anything to do with themselves (Marx himself famously said that he was not a Marxist).


In cases like that, it is often much more helpful to discuss the actual substance(s) of the topic(s), such as equality, property ownership, markets, exploitation, and philosophy of history (all of which have separate articles in SEP) than to try to dissect the incredibly broad, vague, and diverse set of ideologies that "Marxism" is.

SEP has articles on a number of other people who took Marxism and ran with it in different directions, such as Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical theory as a whole. It also has a bunch of other articles on strands of feminism that were deeply influenced by Marx. It is the mark of an important thinker that he shows up all over the place in all sorts of topics.

Whatever you think Marxism is about, I'm pretty sure you can learn about it on SEP. But you can't do that by reading a single article, any more than you can learn a major web framework by reading a single file.

But I do admit that SEP would benefit from more hyperlinks to make related articles more discoverable.


The policy is actually to have articles on issues in philosophy (rather than the philosophies of particular people) with exceptions for historical articles about peoples lives. The article on Marx is such an exception and the lack of an article on marxism is a result of the policy.


I did a search on "Marxism". Got 79 articles back. I don't think it can fairly be accused of ignoring Marxism.


That's because they is a good number of articles that mention "Marxism" as a philosophy, yet it doesn't have it's own article.




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