Mikhail Lifshits on the Antinomies of Winckelmann^[1]

Vesa Oittinen

ABSTRACT: In 1933 Mikhail Lifshits published an essay titled Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Three Epochs of Bourgeois Weltanschauung which was written as an introduction to a Russian edition of Winckelmann’s famous treatise on the history of the art in antiquity. In his text, translated into English in 1946, Lifshits saw Winckelmann as an adherent of Enlightenment rationalism (comparing him, i.a., with Robespierre) and tried to show how the later bourgeois reception of Winckelmann’s ideas degraded in three steps to fascist irrationalism. In the present essay I discuss this in relation with the question of cultural heritage and the problems of a Marxist interpretation of 18th century aesthetics (Diderot, Lessing). The work of Vladimir Grib is presented as further elaborating on Lifshits’ ideas, which are connected to the imminent Popular Front strategy.

KEYWORDS: Mikhail Lifshits, Vladimir Grib, Winckelmann, Robespierre, Diderot, Lessing, Marxist Aesthetics, Neo-Classicist Art, Cultural Heritage.

Introduction

In this paper, I intend to discuss some aspects which pertain to the question of Enlighternment vs. Fascism in the analysis of the Soviet aesthetician and philosopher Mikhail Lifshits (1905–1983) of the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). There are several reasons for this choice. First, Marxist scholars have generally not been interested in Winckelmann, although they dealt with the heritage of classicism. There exist only few, if any, studies on his work written from a Marxist viewpoint; Lifshits’ essay still stands out today as maybe the most important attempt in this regard, although it was written already in 1933. Another reason is that Lifshits’ singular position in the field of Marxist aesthetics has recently led to a growing international interest in him and his work has begun to rise from the relative obscurity into which he was forced during the Soviet years.^[2] Indeed, the thought of Lifshits has edges which do not seem to fit with the ideas of “ordinary Marxism.” In 2016 I edited, together with my Russian colleague Andrey Maidansky, a special Lifshits issue of the journal Studies in East European Thought. In the introduction to the issue, we called Lifshits an “enigmatic Marxist,” a thinker which seems to elude all efforts to label him straightforwardly (Maidansky and Oittinen 2016). His rejection of Modernism has led many to regard him as a conservative, which he is not, at least not in the usual sense of the term. Later in his life, he developed a project he called (alluding to Francis Bacon) Restauratio Magna, whose core idea was that in the socialist society a restoration of the entire positive cultural heritage of humanity should take place.^[3]

In the theory of art, Lifshits's attempt was to reconstruct a “genuine” Marxist aesthetics from disparate utterings of Marx and Engels and in a constant two-front struggle against the “vulgar sociologism” of the Soviet 1920s on the one side, and the ultra-leftist Formalist tendencies, on the other. The so-called Plekhanovian orthodoxy had reduced the Marxist theory of art into a kind of sociology. Lifshits’ intention was to show that it is possible to reconstruct a Marxist theory of aesthetics sui generis, which would not reduce to a mere analysis of the social conditions (i.e., the “class position”) of the artists’ work.  In the early 1930s the young Lifshits met with Georg Lukács in Moscow at the Marx-Engels-Archive, and this inaugurated a period of fruitful collaboration and exchange which lasted for several years. Both Lifshits and Lukács contributed to the journal Literaturnyi Kritik on a regular basis until it was closed down by a Party decree in 1940. This journal was important organ of discussing not only the interpretation but the political implication of classic cultural heritage. Among further contributors to the journal the most famous was the novelist Andrei Platonov, and in addition, there were some like-minded young colleagues of Lifshits, as Vladimir Grib (1908-1940), who developed some of Lifshits’ ideas further, as I will try to show below.

In the 1930s Lifshits seems to have been a prolific writer. This decade of the rise and consolidation of Stalinism was a formative one as regards to his views. Indeed, he characterised himself repeatedly as “the man of the Thirties.” His study on Winckelmann, which is the product of this decade, has hitherto evaded the interest of researchers, maybe because it has been generally assumed that nothing interesting has been published in the USSR after the suppression of the philosophical discussion culture of the 1920s.^[4] Lifshits’ article Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Three Epochs of the Bourgeois Weltanschauung was published originally in 1933 as an introduction to the Russian translation of Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Why just he was chosen to write this piece, is not known to me, but obviously his earlier activity at the VKhUTEMAS art school and the connections he made there, played a role. An English translation of Lifshits’ text with minor omissions came out after the WWII in 1946 in a well-known journal of phenomenological research, due to allied collaboration in the cultural field during WWII (Lifshitz 1946). 

The text does not, actually, discuss the topic we would expect for an introduction, namely Winckelmann’s history of the art of antiquity. Instead, it is an exposé, written from a Marxist point of view, about the historical situation in which Winckelmann’s ideas arose and how they were received later on in terms of cultural politics.

According to Lifshits, Winckelmann’s aesthetics is a subject which lends itself to an especially productive treatment, since his History of the Art of Antiquity takes us into the laboratory of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, where “the elements of the ideology of bourgeois society are being concocted from the diversified materials of old concepts” (1946, 45).

Bourgeois vs. Citoyen

Lifshits wrote his Winckelmann essay at a moment when a radical turn in the cultural politics of the young Soviet state had just taken place. The experimental phase of the 1920s had been abandoned in favour of a more “traditional” position as to what kind of culture the “proletarian state” should strive. A return to less radical views on culture was envisaged. The Proletkult idea, which dominated the 1920s and claimed that a new proletarian culture should be created as if ex nihilo, abandoning the tradition, was rejected as utopian and unsuitable for the practical needs of cultural construction work and education of the masses. This turn around the year 1930 has by many mistakenly been interpreted as a result of purely “Stalinist” politics. In fact, it found support already in Lenin’s cultural program, according to which Marxism should be seen as the “quintessence” of all previous cultural history of mankind.  In order to properly understand Lifshits’ essay on Winckelmann, it must be read as a contribution to this discussion on the problems of what later had been known as the Erbeaneignung.^[5] 

It was of course clear at the outset, that not everything in the heritage of the old culture would suit as building material for the new socialist culture. But how to separate the wheat from the chaff? Lifshits’ idea was to show that there can be discerned at least three main periods in assessing Winckelmann’s aesthetic heritage, and of these, the Enlightenment interpretation—of course purged from its constraints—would best serve the purposes of the new age. 

Lifshits’ Winckelmann essay is a very dense text, and I cannot highlight all ideas from its rich contents in this paper; for example, the concept of the “midway” as a dialectical synthesis, central for Lifshits’ later works, must here remain without further analysis. Here I will focus only on a couple of themes, based on the idea of the political importance of heritage taken from the two most important authorities which Lifshits used to construct his Marxist analysis of Winckelmann. These authorities are Hegel and Marx. From Hegel, Lifshits takes the idea of the inherent dualism of bourgeois society and culture, a dualism which becomes apparent in the conflicting roles of bourgeois vs. homme/citoyen. From Marx he takes the idea that this dualism leads to illusions which have implications even for the aesthetical thought of the Enlightenment era, above all for Winckelmann. This idea comes ultimately from Marx’ Eighteenth Brumaire, which was not a work on aesthetics, but an analysis of French politics. However, in its foreword Marx presented thoughts which Lifshits found fruitful and applicable for a study of Winckelmann. 

In the foreword to the Eighteenth Brumaire, which contains many passages which later have become loci classici, Marx notes the well-known fact of the intimate connection between Neo-Classicism and the French Revolution. This connection was created during the last quarter of the eighteenth century by such artists influenced by Winckelmann’s theories as Jean-Louis David, who had an important role in creating the imagery of the coming French revolution. As Lifshits writes, notwithstanding the fact that the imagery of Neo-Classicism later evolved into the Empire style of the Napoleonic era, and “[a]s if a mockery of Winckelmann’s ideas, the Russian autocracy saw the symbol of official pomp in the Doric columns of its arsenals, palaces and manèges,” the actual realization of Winckelmann’s principles was in one way or another tied up with the revolutionary era” (1946, 45). His idea of “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” was but “the condensed formula for all the civic virtues which the revolutionary movement of the time got from the ruins of the ancient world” (ibid.).

Marx does not mention Winckelmann nor David, but gives, nevertheless, an impressive sketch in Eighteenth Brumaire of how the spell of this Classicist imagery worked. The French Revolution of 1789-1814 “did […] drape itself alternately as Roman Republic and Roman Empire.” Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just and others “achieved in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their time: the emancipation and the establishment of modern bourgeois society.” The reason for this quid pro quo was, according to Marx, that the protagonists of a new bourgeois order found in the “stern classic traditions of the Roman republic the ideals and the form, the self-deceptions, that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles, and to keep their passion up to the height of a great historic tragedy” (Marx 1943, 24–26). Once the new bourgeois establishment was set on foot, the Greek and Roman imagery recedes into the background and the prosaic quotidian life of bourgeois society begins. 

If we take these words of Marx at their face value, they would mean that the Neo-Classical aesthetics was from its beginnings in Winckelmann founded on an illusion! Let us examine this a bit closer. A further analysis soon reveals, that there indeed exists an illusory moment in Winckelmann’s Classicist ideas—a moment which is the expression of a fundamental antinomy of the new, bourgeois society which emerged from the revolution of 1789. Hegel had noted this antinomy in his Philosophy of Right when he said that the modern societies are characterised by a dualism between the State and the civil society. Hegel’s original insight to the significance of this antinomy comes from his reading of the works of Scottish Enlightenment, especially Adam Ferguson, whose important work on civil society was published in 1767, and in German translation already in the next year. The dualism of two spheres in society is a phenomenon which we do not encounter in Antiquity, where the members constituting a polis are automatically, ipso facto, the citizens of the state, too. For Hegel, this dualism could be dialectically sublated in the higher unity of the State, but Marx was more skeptical. According to him, there is a constant discrepancy between bourgeois and citoyen, a discrepancy which, as we just saw, produces an illusionary view of how matters really stand in a capitalist society. 

Applying these ideas of Marx to the analysis of Winckelmann’s oeuvre, Lifshits sees in Winckelmann the representant of the citoyen pole of the antinomy:

[T]he actual realization of Winckelmann’s principles was on one way or another tied up with the revolutionary era. The name and doctrine of Winckelmann were symbols for this epoch. His idea of “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” was but the condensed formula for all the civic virtues which the revolutionary movement of the time got from the ruins of the ancient world. (Lifshits 1946, 44)

According to Lifshits, “[t]he French Revolution was the great test for the whole scheme of Winckelmann’s views,” which stipulated a harmony between the “individual” (read: the bourgeois, the man of the civil society pursuing his egoist interests) and the “general” (read: the citizen of the state). But the test of history proved, that Winckelmann, who died already in 1764, a quarter-century before the French revolution, still “looked at the bourgeois society quite abstractly” (Lifshits 1946, 50). The real experience of people taking part in the revolution “introduced essential corrections in the first, still very abstract and conditional picture of bourgeois democracy” which Winckelmann yet had. With the fall of Robespierre in Thermidor of 1794 the “idealist” phase of the French revolution ended, and “[a]long with him crashed the attempt to hold the developing antagonism of the new classes in check by means of an idealist policy on the model provided by the Antiquity, a policy of ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’” (ibid.).

Lifshits thus equates Winckelmann’s concept of the ideal beauty with Robespierre’s idea of a civic virtue. Both were too abstract to resist the press of the real forces of history. Indeed, although Lifshits mentions Robespierre in this context only in passing, we might substantiate his claim by a comparison of certain crucial utterances from Winckelmann and Robespierre. In his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764, Winckelmann says: “Beauty may be compared with the purest spring water: the less taste it has, the more wholesome it is, since it is free from all alien admixture” (quoted in 1946, 46). Robespierre, in turn, noted in his speech at the Convent in February 5, 1794: “What is the fundamental principle of popular or democratic government, that is to say, the essential mainspring which sustains it and makes it move? It is virtue. I speak of the public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France…” Thus, for Robespierre, republican ‘virtue’ (vertu) was a principle not contaminated by ‘egotism’ (i.e., self-interest), just as ‘beauty’ was for Winckelmann nothing but “pure spring water.” 

Diderot and Lessing–Grib’s elaboration

In face of these illusions, Lifshits sees Diderot and Lessing as delivering necessary corrections to Winckelmann’s abstract scheme with its Platonising approach. Against the German art historian, “Diderot upheld the right of the empirical individual, made not of gypsum and marble, but of flesh and blood” (Lifshits does not mention the source of the quotation, but obviously refers to Diderot’s Salon de 1765). The opposition between Winckelmann and Diderot is, says Lifshits, “the contradiction between life and the ideal” (Lifshits 1946, 44). Yet more pronounced is the critique of Winckelmann by Lessing, who published a year after Diderot’s criticism his Laocoon (1766), raising several objections against the classicism of the former:

Lessing grants that the plastic arts should create their objects in conformity with “plastic nature” (“if there is such a thing”, Emilia Galotti, I, 4) and bear their heroes to a state of calm repose above the resistance of matter, above the decay that comes with time. This ideal form is the beauty which is characteristic of plastic art. But life is broader than beauty, and includes factors which do not fit within the frame of the calm form, —unresolved contradictions, strong passions, personal peculiarities, suffering. As a state of repose after the result has been attained is characteristic of the plastic arts, so life in all its multiplicity reigns in poetry. “Noble simplicity and calm grandeur” are beautiful, but the truth in life, such as the individual’s suffering and passions […]—all this, in Lessing’s view, is a sphere of its own, and not merely a region of falling-away from the ideal. (Lifshits 1946, 44–45)

The role of Lessing as the necessary correction and antipode to Winckelmann is highlighted much stronger by a younger member of the circle around the journal Literaturnyj Kritik, Vladimir Grib. Today almost totally forgotten (maybe it will yet come a time to save him from oblivion!), Grib worked on a Marxist biography of Lessing, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Lessinga. Its manuscript was ready in 1939, but it was not published until in a posthumous collection of his texts which became possible thanks to the de-Stalinisation after 1956.  Initially, his analysis of the differences between Winckelmann and Lessing concurs exactly with that of Lifshits. After having mentioned, that Winckelmann had seen the merits of Greek art as depending directly on the Republican organization of the state, Grib continues:

The views of Winckelmann are based on an idealistic conception of the nature of the state, common to the Classicism of the Enlightenment period in its entirety, a conception which in an illusory manner saw the state as rising above the struggle between egoistic interests […] There, in the ideal sphere of the citoyenship where the everyday passions and troubles are not known, the social contradictions are smoothed down and solved in a harmony […] Close to the spirit of the French materialists, Winckelmann develops the speculative moment of their views in his doctrine of a non-egoistic sensuality as the main presupposition of freedom. (Grib 1956, 94–95)

Lessing, on the contrary, was, thanks to his more down-to-earth stance, more radical and his critique of the feudalist structures remained not abstract, as in Winckelmann. Here Grib sees the reason to formulate the citoyen vs. bourgeois dualism in sharper, more politicised terms than Lifshits:

The contradiction between Winckelmann and Lessing was, in the circumstances of Germany, a contradiction between the bourgeois and the plebeian-democratic ways to work for the destruction of feudalism, analogical to the opposition between the Girondists and the Jacobins. Like Winckelmann and Lessing, the revolutionaries of the year 1793, too, were adherents to a classicism in politics and they defended the balancing of personal and social interests as the ground for freedom and equality. But their understanding of the measures to be taken in the revolution were deeply different. The Girondists, such as Roland and Condorcet, were of the opinion that between the personal and social interests there exists a natural harmony. (Grib 1956 ,96)

Grib sees the political differences between the Gironde (which was the germ of what later was to become the liberal bourgeoisie) and the Montagne (the radicals, the Jacobins) reflected in different aesthetic programs:

This “aesthetic” Classicism of the Gironde, which found its expression in the poetry of André Chenier, was countered by the “ascetic” Classicism of the Jacobins, which was close to the stern art of David. The Jacobins saw that an unbounded development of personal interest would in the bourgeois society lead to inequality, poverty, exploitation. (Grib 1956, 96–97) 

Although Grib acknowledges the closeness of Winckelmann’s ideas to David and thus to the Jacobins, he nevertheless connects Winckelmann with the politics of the Gironde and sees in Lessing’s more sensualist aesthetics “a kinship with the aspirations of the Jacobins” (1956, 97). It is not my aim here to analyse the differences between Lifshits and Grib further, but it seems to me that the latter’s attempt to deduce from the aesthetic programs of the Enlightenment direct analogies to the political parties during the French revolution show, that the “Lifshits school” around the journal Literaturnyi Kritik (or “current,” techenie, as they called themselves) had not fully managed to get rid from the ballast of the vulgar sociologism of the 1920s, against which it had declared an open war. It is noteworthy, though, that while Lifshits places Winckelmann in close connection with Robespierre, Grib on the contrary sees in him serving a Girondist aesthetics.

Despite the necessary corrections to Winckelmann’s theory of art made by Diderot and Lessing, the “ideal moment” can, of course, not be discarded in aesthetics. “The emotional Diderot and the calm contemplator Winckelmann in essence present two sides of a single philosophy,” Lifshits writes (1946, 47). It is the dualism of abstract, virtuous citoyen and the flesh-and-blood, egoistic bourgeois, which presuppose each other, as they constitute the framework inside which the modern capitalist society has to move. Thus, far from being a mere error, Winckelmann’s abstract aesthetic ideal is, so to say, a necessary illusion – necessary in the sense that it is produced by the inherent dualism of bourgeois society and fixes the one pole of the antinomy. Although Lifshits does not develop his thoughts in this direction, it might be said, that the illusion of an abstract citoyen has similar functions as the illusions of commodity fetishism described by Marx in Capital.  Be that as it may, let us quote Lifshits once more:

The aesthetic ideal of Winckelmann is the adequate expression of the contemplative side of the eighteenth-century materialism. He thereby constitutes a transition from the philosophy of the Enlightenment to the idealism of the classical German writers of the time of the Revolution, the idealism of Goethe and Hegel. From Winckelmann stems the glorification of the general, typical beauty over “expression,” of the idea over sensuous satisfaction, of drawing over colouring (“What is the colour compared to the form?” cries the German Jacobin, Georg Forster). (Lifshits 1946, 47)

This is a trait in Winckelmann’s heritage, which remains constant and will be again and again become actual, as long as the bourgeois society exists:

Every tendency in art which rises above the meanness and triviality of bourgeois life includes an element of artistic idealization and pays tribute to the Winckelmann tradition. (Lifshits 1946, 47)

Why Three Epochs?

There remains yet to answer the question, why Lifshits mentioned “three epochs” in the rubric of his Winckelmann introduction. Why did he think it was important to evaluate the reception of Winkcelmann’s ideas in three subsequent epochs? It seems that the answer is that Lifshits follows the same train of thought as Lukács a little later in his well-known book Zerstörung der Vernunft (published only in 1954 but outlined already during the 1930s). The idea of Lukács’ work was to explore how the emergence of a Fascist ideology in Germany was possible. The subtitle of the book, “The Path of Irrationalism: From Schelling to Hitler” already gave a clue of the main methodical idea of the study. The thesis is that the bourgeois thought and ideology had their classical period before the French revolution—this is the epoch of Enlightenment, with is defense of Reason, democracy and human rights. However, after the bourgeoisie has attained political power, it gradually abandons its lofty principles as it has to defend its class positions against the rising proletarian movement. The saturated bourgeoisie gives up the principles of Reason and democracy, which were defended in the eighteenth century, and turns increasingly to irrationalism. The logical end point of this development is then, according to Lukács, Fascism.

Lifshits’ study on Winckelmann could be read as a preliminary sketch, outlined already in the first years of the 1930s, of this Lukácsian scheme. The “decadence of bourgeois democracy” sets in, according to Lifshits, in the nineteenth century, when the classics of the previous, more radical epoch, of which Winckelmann is one, enter into the humanist school (Gymnasium) and university tradition—but so that “the more heady components of their Weltanschauung are diluted with large quantities of liberal water to make them harmless for youth” (1946, 55). This is the second epoch, which comes after the Enlightenment:

To compare this epoch with Winckelmann’s circle of ideas, one need only compare any wealthy home of the late nineteenth century with the Empire style. In both we shall find columns and capitals, antique decorations and various elements à la grecque. But in the fin de siècle classicism all the form lines are fused in a mass of detail; the facade is like a skin drawn tightly over the bones of an animal whatsoever. The eclectic architecture has no trace of the rigorous principles which gave even the private home the character of a public building. The surface remains as it was, but the internal essence is all changed. (Lifshits 1946, 55–56)

But much worse than the changes in the aesthetics of the everyday life are the mutations in the theoretical development of the second epoch. Now, a cautious positivism reigns: “The history of art, which in Winckelmann was continually linked with philosophical-historical approximations to the essence of art, now definitely broke with anything outside the limits of pure collection of facts” (1946, 56). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, bourgeois thought grows more radical in its rejection of the heritage of the Enlightenment, a development which Lifshits exemplifies by comparing the views of Winckelmann on antiquity with those of the renowned historian Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897). Whilst for Winckelmann, Greece was the norm to follow and the type to emulate, Burckhardt’s picture is utterly different. “He seeks in the Greek world rather the concentration of all the negative human traits, everything abnormal and tragic” (1946, 68). 

In this context, Burckhardt is important above all due to his influence on Nietzsche’s views on the antiquity and the Greeks. In Nietzsche’s writing, the “tragic” interpretation of antiquity assumes a much more clear-cut character than in Burckhardt. Nietzsche accuses Winckelmann’s interpretation of the Greeks as a “most violent vulgarisation” (quoted in 1946, 69). Instead of Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek clarity, Nietzsche stresses the “murky atmosphere of the mythical” and the Dionysiac element. Instead of Greek optimism and humanism, Nietzsche will speak of their cruelty and mortal hatred towards each other. Above all, Nietzsche highlighted the role of slavery which, according to him, was the conditio sine qua non of all higher culture.

From Nietzsche it is, according to Lifshits, only a short step to the third and final phase of bourgeois Weltanschauung, namely Fascism. It should be borne in mind, that Lifshits published his article in the same year as Hitler gained power. He quotes “[o]ne of the better-known Hitlerite intellectuals, Alfred Baeumler,” a professor of political pedagogy in Berlin. According to Baeumler, the main fault of Winckelmann, seen from the viewpoint of Fascist ideology, was his indifference towards the myths. For the Fascists, the irrationalism of the myth is, on the contrary, the quintessence of their ideology:

The basis of his [Winckelmann’s] negative attitude toward mythology, as Bäumler correctly remarks, is the fundamental idea of the Enlightenment, the idea of “free people,” free among other things from superstition. It is precisely in this hostility to mysticism that Bäumler sees the basic defect of the aesthetics of the ideal […]. Bäumler […] asserts that Greek art, too, cannot be understood apart from religious feeling. “Winckelmann,” he says, “cut the ’plant’ of Greek art from its roots. He observed it only in the part that grew in the sun: the roots, hidden in the dark material realm of the Earth, escaped his view.” ^[6] (Lifshits 1946, 77)

The third epoch of bourgeois Winckelmann reception thus means, as Lifshits sees the actual situation emerging in the early 1930s, that the Enlightenment thinker has become homeless, abandoned by his own class. Lifshits’ essay on Winckelmann does not discuss the further consequences of this nor what should in concreto to be done. Instead, the last sentence of Lifshits’ article constates bruskly, and rather dogmatically: “Only the proletarian culture of a socialist society, based on the annihilation of classes and of the remnants of capitalism, constitutes the genuine solution of these contradictions” (i.e. the contradictions of Winckelmann himself and of his reception) (1946, 82). It is either—or. 

This could be seen as a pointing out of cultural political chances for the socialist camp. At the time Lifshits’ engagement seems to have been premature, but it took, however, only a couple of years for the situation to change, and with it the perspectives of a socialist cultural politics.  The VII. Congress of Comintern in 1935 launched a new strategy, that of a Popular Front against Fascism, which seemed to open a way out of the impasse in which Lifshits’ idea, as a forerunning one, was still stuck in 1933. This new strategy stressed the importance of not only a broad political alliance between Communists, other Left forces and bourgeois democrats against Fascism, but a cultural alliance, too. The experience of the Popular Front in France of 1936 showed, that it was possible to mobilize the heritage of the Enlightenment against Fascist ideologemes. This, however, is a story which must be dealt with in another paper.

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Biography

Vesa Oittinen is Professor emeritus of the Aleksanteri Instutute at the University of Helsinki.