Principle of Contradiction

Conze’s monograph The Principle of Contradiction: On the Theory of Dialectical Materialism is his most important philosophical work and the foundation for his later publications as a Buddhist scholar and translator. The openly Marxist work was published under considerable risk to both printer and author alike in December 1932 in Hamburg, Germany. Only months later, in May 1933, almost all of the five hundred copies of the first edition were destroyed during the Nazi book burning campaign. It is only now, more than eighty years later, that Conze’s key philosophical work is made available to a broad audience in this English translation.^ In the work, Conze sets out to develop a detailed account of the historical and material conditions that support the emergence, production, and transmission of theoretical knowledge as exemplified by the principle of contradiction and, furthermore, to show that under different social and historical conditions the allegedly necessary truth and indubitable content of the principle would dissolve and be replaced by a radically different understanding of the principle of contradiction a dialectic understanding of the principle that would compel a rejecti