BERNSTEIN, EDUARD. - German politician, born in Berlin in 1850, died there in 1932. He was one of the principal adherents of orthodox Marxism. He subsequently broke away from it, criticizing it in his book Socialismo teorico e socialismo pratico (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 foremost exponents of reformist socialism. Because of his position he engaged in violent polemics with the uncompromising socialists, especially with Kautsky. In 1915, in order to defend the Social Democrats against the accusation of having voted for the war credits in 1914, he published, in collaboration with Kautsky, with whom he had already been reconciled, a manifesto in which the responsibility of the Social Democrats was dissociated from the war policy of the Empire. He was a deputy in the Reichstag.
Principal works: Il socialismo in Inghilterra dal XVI al XVII sec., 1894; Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1908; Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Sozialismus, Berlin 1901; Ferdinando Lassalle, ibid. 1919; Die deutsche Revolution, ihre Entstehung, ihr Verlauf und ihr Wert, Berlin 1921.