Maurice Cornforth

• Name — Maurice C. Cornforth • Born — 28 October 1909 • Birthplace — Willesden, Middlesex, England • Died — 31 December 1980 • Place of death — Islington, London, England • Spouse — Kitty Klugmann (died 1965); Kathleen Elliott • Alma Mater — University College London Trinity College, Cambridge • School Tradition — Marxism

Cornforth was born in Willesden, London, in 1909, and educated at University College School, where he was friends with Stephen Spender. In 1925 he went up to University College London, graduating in 1929, and then went on as an affiliated student to read Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the only student on a specialised course in logic, taught by Moore, Braithwaite, and Wittgenstein. In 1931, after graduating, Cornforth was awarded a three-year research scholarship at Trinity. In the summer of the same year he joined the Communist Party, setting up the party's first organisation at Cambridge with fellow students such as David Guest; and in the autumn married a fellow Cambridge student, Kitty Klugmann, sister of James. From 1933 Cornforth worked full-time for the Communist Party in East Anglia. Rejected for military service on medical grounds, during the Second World War Cornforth worked as a farm labourer. He published his first work, Science Versus Idealism, in 1946. In 1950 he was appointed as managing director of Lawrence & Wishart, a post he held until 1975, during which period he was responsible for the publishing of Marx's and Engels's Collected Works. Cornforth died aged 71 in Islington, London, in 1980, leaving a widow, Kathleen Elliott, his second wife.

• Food and Farming for Victory, Communist Party Pamphlet (1942) • Science Versus Idealism: An Examination of "Pure Empiricism" and Modern Logic (1946) • Dialectical Materialism and Science (1949) • In Defense of Philosophy – Against Positivism and Pragmatism (1950) • Science for Peace and Socialism (c.1950) with J. D. Bernal • Dialectical Materialism Vol. 1: Materialism & the Dialectical Method, Vol. 2: Historical Materialism, Vol 3: Theory of Knowledge • Readers' Guide to the Marxist Classics (1952) • Rumanian Summer: A View of the Rumanian People's Republic (1953) with Jack Lindsay • Science Versus Idealism: In Defense of Philosophy against Positivism and Pragmatism (1955) • Philosophy for Socialists (1959) • Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965) • The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A Reply to Dr. Karl Popper's Refutations of Marxism (1968) • Communism and Human Values (1972) • Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in honour of A. L. Morton (1978) editor • Communism & Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism (1980)