KAUTSKY, KARL. - German socialist, b. in Prague on 16 Oct. 1854, d. in exile in Amsterdam on 17 Oct. 1938. He was secretary to F. Engels and, within German socialism, represented in a certain sense the continuity of the "classical tradition" of Marxism.
He was a determined opponent of the reformist and revisionist tendencies within German socialism, whose foremost exponent was Bernstein. The totalitarian methods used by the Russian Bolsheviks, however, found in K. a very severe critic: indeed, in the last years of his life Lenin called him a renegade and dedicated a harsh polemical writing to him. Among K.'s notable works: Thomas More und seine Utopie (1887); Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm (1898); Die Diktatur des Proletariats (1918); Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (1927).
For a long time K. was called "the pontiff of socialism." He was, however, a rather flat philosophical mind; his irony lacks refinement and depth; in his Marxism one notices an accent that has perhaps not wrongly been called "professorial" and a spiritual affinity with positivist positions. On the political plane, K., who in 1917 founded the "Independent Socialist Party," is the exponent of a characteristic mixture of a fundamentally bourgeois temperament and schemes inspired by the class struggle as conceived in Marxist terms. He represents in a certain sense the typical position of a socialism oscillating between petty everyday compromise and outworn semi-revolutionary formulas, between humanitarian dreams of a democratic stamp and harsh dogmatic intransigence: a position perilous for every democracy that has a sense of reality and responsibility and, at the same time, of clear inferiority in the face of fanatical and consistent revolutionaries.
Bibliography
Wolf Giusti