Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Political thought after the French Revolution
- II Modern liberty and its defenders
- III Modern liberty and its critics
- IV Secularity, reform and modernity
- 18 Church and state: the problem of authority
- 19 The politics of nature
- 20 Conservative political thought from the revolutions of 1848 until the fin de siècle
- 21 Modern liberty redefined
- 22 Political economy
- 23 German socialism and social democracy 1860 –1900
- 24 Russian political thought of the nineteenth century
- 25 European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century
- 26 Empire and imperialism
- Epilogue
- Biographies
- Bibliography
- Index
23 - German socialism and social democracy 1860 –1900
from IV - Secularity, reform and modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Political thought after the French Revolution
- II Modern liberty and its defenders
- III Modern liberty and its critics
- IV Secularity, reform and modernity
- 18 Church and state: the problem of authority
- 19 The politics of nature
- 20 Conservative political thought from the revolutions of 1848 until the fin de siècle
- 21 Modern liberty redefined
- 22 Political economy
- 23 German socialism and social democracy 1860 –1900
- 24 Russian political thought of the nineteenth century
- 25 European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century
- 26 Empire and imperialism
- Epilogue
- Biographies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Origins of socialist political thought
It might have been expected that the political thinking of German social democracy would build upon a variety of European socialists who wrote before 1848. However, that was seldom the case. To be sure, German intellectuals knew something of the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Proudhon, Simonde de Sismondi, Owen, Blanqui and Blanc, but it is difficult to show that those ideas guided the later organisations of the German labour movement. People familiar with the polemical literature in German, notably that produced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, often gained their knowledge of early socialist thought second hand. The intention of Marx and Engels, of course, was not to disseminate the ideas of those they labelled ‘utopian’, but to discredit them. To be sure, in 1888, August Bebel published a very sympathetic account of Fourier's ideas, but he also stressed the weaknesses of the ‘utopian's’ thinking.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought , pp. 780 - 810Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
- 2
- Cited by