Richard Levins, as noted agroecologist and mathematical ecologist John Vandermeer has observed, “was and remains ‘legendary’ in ecology.” Within ecological science itself, Levins’s contributions are vast and paradigm shifting. One critical innovation, to which he devoted much of his life work, was the development of a method called “loop analysis, a mathematical technique that uses some basic qualitative understanding of the dynamics of differential equations to formulate…how variables effectively act to loop back on themselves (a predator that overeats a prey, for example, creates a negative loop on itself by reducing its own key resources).” Through this research, “Levins showed how loop analysis could be applied in all sorts of ecological situations, effectively creating a new mode of analysis of ecological systems.” At the same time, Levins’s contributions to science and critical thought far transcended his forays into mathematical ecology, as he engaged ecology in its widest dimensions including population ecology, ecological systems analysis, evolutionary processes, the philosophy and history of science, agroecology, ecodevelopment, socioecological planning, environmental history, public health, Marxian ecological theory, and ecosocialism—all of which for him, taken together, constituted the truth as the whole.

　　At the root of all of Levins’s thinking, from the days of his youth to his work as a mature ecological scientist, was a conception of the dialectics of nature and society drawn from such thinkers as Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Christopher Caudwell, Marcel Prenant, Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen, and C. H. Waddington. As he cogently observed, “perhaps the first investigation of a complex object as a system was the masterwork of Karl Marx, Das Kapital,” which explored both the economic and ecological bases of capitalism as a system. Marx’s materialist dialectics extended to not only the political-economic critique of capitalism and the argument for socialism on that basis, but also contributed to a dialectical naturalism that encompassed the ecological connections/contradictions of humanity and the earth, necessitating social change.

　　It was thus materialist dialectics, as it had been developed by numerous thinkers in the Marxist tradition, particularly in the natural sciences, that was the foundation and the focal point for all of Levins’s intellectual endeavors from the very beginning, constituting the fundamental method and logic governing his thought. “Dialectical thinking,” he wrote, “with its emphasis on complexity, context, change, discontinuity, interpenetration, and contradictions was, and has remained a thing of beauty for me and the guiding theme in my scientific research and my political teaching in Party study groups, popular lectures, and writings.… I loved asymmetry and complexity, threshold effects, contradiction.”

　　Although Levins’s work grew out of historical materialism, he found himself in deep conflict with much of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, which had systematically sought to separate itself, and dialectical thought, from the ecological world as a whole and along with it the world of science, through the rejection of the notion of the dialectics of nature, fundamental to generations of Marxist thinkers. While critical of the Soviet dogmatism that arose in the late 1930s, Levins remained convinced that dialectical materialism was the key to understanding the complexity of both nature and society and their interactions. Writing in “A Science of Our Own” in Monthly Review in 1986, he stated:

　　In the quest for respectability, many Western European Marxists, especially among the Eurocommunists, are attempting to confine the scope of Marxism to the formulation of a progressive economic program. They therefore reject as “Stalinism” the notion that dialectical materialism has anything to say about natural science beyond a critique of its misuse and monopolization.… Both the Eurocommunist critics of dialectical materialism and the dogmatists [those who reduce dialectical materialism to mere formalism] accept an idealized description of science.

　　Western Marxism, while drawing its inspiration from the first foundation of Marxist thought, often referred to as historical materialism, rejected its second foundation, or dialectical naturalism, associated with the dialectics of nature in both science and art. If the first foundation had its primary source in Marx’s thought, the second foundation is often associated with Engels, but also encompassed a vast array of thinkers, some of them purged in the Soviet Union, or subject to red baiting in the West. This included leading scientists and philosophers of science of the late twentieth century. Levins, along with his close associates Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould—all three of whom were based at Harvard—derived their inspiration to a considerable extent from dialectical materialism/dialectical naturalism, as evidenced by such works as Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist and Biology Under the Influence and Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

　　“The truth is the whole,” G. W. F. Hegel wrote in the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, and therefore cannot be understood except in the process of its becoming, its development. To comprehend the nature and significance of Levins’s holistic ecological thought, it is necessary to see it genetically, that is, in terms of its formation and development. In this way, we can trace the revolutionary insights into theory and practice that his analysis provided, helping us to address the planetary emergency of the present century. The current “eco-social distress syndrome” behind today’s habitability crisis, Lewontin and Levins argued, “is more profound than previous crises, reaching higher into the atmosphere, deeper into the earth, more widespread in space, and more long lasting, penetrating more corners of our lives.” Thus, as Levins contended, it was absolutely necessary to grasp the roots of the socioecological crisis via an approach that allowed for comprehending the complexity of the whole, dynamic interactions, the uncertain, and the possible.

　　From: Monthly Review 2025 76 (8)

　　Editor: Wang Yi