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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where did Trotsky place his first political sympathies?

2. What thinker did Marx return to after he broke with Proudhon?

3. How do Marx and Engels describe the proletariat?

4. Why did Marx break with Proudhon?

5. According to Wilson, why did the theory by Marx and Engels create "strange situations"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What conditions made Russia a good candidate for a transition to communism?

2. Describe the environment where Engels grew up.

3. How does Edmund Wilson say Marx thought about Das Kapital?

4. How does dialectical materialism correlate to economic phenomena?

5. Describe Lenin's meeting with Trotsky.

6. How was Engels brought to socialism?

7. Describe Lenin's relationship with his wife.

8. What defined the views of Marx and Engels on international relationships between nations?

9. What reforms did the 1905 Soviet institute?

10. What is dialectical materialism?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How would you characterize Edmund Wilson's values and his intellectual temperament? What part of this genealogy was interesting to Wilson? Judging by his material, his omissions, and his methods, what can you say about Wilson's style and his intellectual preoccupations?

Essay Topic 2

Using Michelet's theory that government is the result of the pressures and forces and works of men, how would you explain our contemporary culture? What pressures and forces and works have created the culture in which we live?

Essay Topic 3

What was the role of education in the development of the theories that led to the Russian Revolution? Were thinkers taught in schools? In communes? What organizations fostered the growth and spread of communism? Which organizations resisted the spread of the ideology with other ideology?

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This section contains 651 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample