The History of Ideology: Yu.P. Frantzev on Ancient Eastern Philosophical Thought

Abstract

The author of the article focuses on the analysis of an unpublished chapter for a collective work on the history of philosophy, written by Yu.P. Frantzev (1903–1969) in 1951 and dedicated to the formation of ancient Eastern ideologies. The author of this unpublished text began his scholar career as an Egyptologist and researcher of early religions; he was a student of the Orientalist V.V. Struve, whose works played an important role in the genesis of Soviet ideas about the sequence of socio-economic formations in world history. After WWII Frant­sev almost completely departed from historical studies, and the unpublished chapter can be considered his farewell to the topics of early career. Frantsev con­structed a text that maximally consistently pursued the idea of the opposition of idealism and materialism in the philosophy of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India and China. The fate of the author, the peculiarities of the construction of the text, analyzed through the context of the development of Soviet humanitarian thought by the end of Stalin's time, allow us to see how the Soviet historical narrative came to the clearest and most logical vision of ideology as a tool for analyzing social thought within its own frame of reference. The benefit for the modern ap­peal to this plot is that reaching this point of narrative unification was identified as a dead end – mostly intuitively, in the case of Frantzev, possibly intellectually