BERNSTEIN, EDUARD. - German politician, b. in Berlin in 1850, d. there in 1932. He was one of the principal followers of orthodox Marxism. Later he broke away from it, criticizing it in his book: *Socialism: Theoretical and Practical* (1899), in which he rejected the theory of the natural end of capitalist society through the concentration of capital and the subsequent transfer of enterprises into the hands of the working proletariat. He thus became one of the leading exponents of reformist socialism. Because of his stance, he engaged in violent polemics with intransigent socialists, especially with Kautsky. In 1915, to defend the Social Democrats from the accusation of having voted in 1914 for war credits, he published, in collaboration with Kautsky—with whom he had already reconciled—a manifesto in which the responsibilities of the Social Democrats were dissociated from the imperial war policy. He was a deputy to the Reichstag.
Principal works: *Socialism in England from the 16th to the 17th Century*, 1894; *Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution*, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1908; *On the History and Theory of Socialism*, Berlin 1901; *Ferdinand Lassalle*, ibid. 1919; *The German Revolution: Its Origins, Course, and Significance*, Berlin 1921.