Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the nature of Bernstein's quest
- Part 1 Preparation
- Part 2 Vision
- Part 3 Disappointment
- 6 Facing the critics
- 7 The revisionist debate extended
- 8 The dawn of a new era
- 9 Bernstein's final battle: confronting socialist instrumentalism
- Epilogue: evolutionary socialism at the “end of socialism”
- Select bibliography
- Index
9 - Bernstein's final battle: confronting socialist instrumentalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the nature of Bernstein's quest
- Part 1 Preparation
- Part 2 Vision
- Part 3 Disappointment
- 6 Facing the critics
- 7 The revisionist debate extended
- 8 The dawn of a new era
- 9 Bernstein's final battle: confronting socialist instrumentalism
- Epilogue: evolutionary socialism at the “end of socialism”
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
The dynamics of social change in the Weimar Republic: the theory–practice problem revisited
One would think that the moral disaster of the Great War and the fundamentally changed political conditions in post-war Germany gave the German labor movement the perfect opportunity finally to embrace a consequent reformist ideology based on ethical socialist principles. Such an initiative would have allowed social democracy to close the old theory-practice gap that had plagued the movement for the past forty years. In fact, there was no dearth of sophisticated reformist-socialist theories developed by a new generation of capable social democratic intellectuals, including distinguished thinkers like Eduard Heimann, Hermann Heller, Leonard Nelson, Hendrik de Man, Paul Tillich, Emil Lederer, and Fritz Naphtali. Though distinct in their intellectual approaches, their conceptual framework was clearly rooted in the intellectual soil of Bernstein's evolutionary socialism.
The harsh political realities of the young Weimar Republic, however, pushed the SPD onto a fundamentally different path. On the surface, of course, social democracy could justifiably claim to have played a crucial role in producing a new democratic constitution that enshrined genuine parliamentarianism and basic political liberties, thus ending long decades of imperial authoritarianism. Yet underneath this freshly painted layer of formal democracy there remained the thick brick wall of the traditional German hierarchical state (Obrigkeitsstaat), pervaded by a strongly anti-democratic political culture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Quest for Evolutionary SocialismEduard Bernstein and Social Democracy, pp. 230 - 252Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997