Bernstein, Eduard

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: Socialismo teorico e socialismo pratico (1899), with which he rejected the theory of the natural end of capitalist society through the concentration of capital and the subsequent passage of enterprises into the hands of the working proletariat. He thus became one of the foremost exponents of reformist socialism. Because of his attitude he had violent polemics with the intransigent socialists, above all with Kautsky. In 1915, in order to defend the Social Democrats from the accusation of having voted in 1914 for the war credits, he published, in collaboration with Kautsky, with whom he had already been reconciled, a manifesto in which the responsibilities of the Social Democrats were separated 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.

Carlo Ramacciotti