Abstract

Focusing on Eduard Bernstein's contribution to socialist thought, my dissertation represents neither a conventional political history nor a traditional "historiography of political ideas," but an in-depth examination of the interaction between the world of German socialist politics and political ideas between 1871 and 1932. Incorporating both new academic developments and current debates on socialism arising from the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, I argue that Bernstein's life and thought warrants extensive research efforts on the basis of his highly original attempt to formulate a coherent synthesis of liberalism and socialism, designed to serve his party as the theoretical blueprint for a politics that would be sensitive to both individual self-realization and the crucial "Social Question." Moreover, I maintain that Bernstein's liberal socialism illuminates the central political predicaments that have haunted the "actually existing" twentieth-century socialisms of both the reformist and the revolutionary kind--the deeply engrained equation of "socialism" with "Marxism;" the alleged antithesis between liberalism and socialism; and the powerful instrumentalist tendency of reformism to thwart traditionally "socialist" goals of system transcendence. ;Severely limited by the concrete political dilemmas of both the Wilhelmine Empire and Weimar Germany, the social democratic leadership rejected Bernstein's theoretical blueprint, thus failing to resolve the discordance between its classical doctrine and the demands of advanced capitalism. Consequently, the labor movement missed a great opportunity for making German political culture more hospitable to democracy. This road not taken points to the tragic role of social democracy in the twentieth-century drama of German politics