On a previous occasion, I have argued that during the two decades preceding the First World War, the French Radical Party, under electoral pressure from the separate and then united Socialist parties of Jaurès and Guesde, began to look for a doctrine around which they could rally to defend their recently acquired hold on power against both the individualists to their right and the collectivists on their left. It was the six-month duration of Léon Bourgeois' purely Radical government of 1895–6 and his Lettres sur le Mouvement Social of 1895, republished in 1896 as a book and entitled Solidarité, that marked the beginning of the belle époque of Radical-socialism and of the Third Republic. It was argued that during the next two decades, Bourgeois' doctrine of Solidarism became for platform, and to a lesser extent, practical political purposes, the official social philosophy of the régime, probably reaching its apotheosis at the time of the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. This pre-eminent position in the doctrinal firmament of France was not achieved without an intensive campaign through a variety of mainly educational pressure groups – to be anticipated in a lay “République des professeurs.” It is the principal channels and people through which this indoctrination was propagated that will be our concern in the pages that follow. However, the activities of the “Universités Populaires”, which were closely allied to the movements discussed here, have been passed over because they have formed the subject-matter of a separate study.

As others before him, the late Humphrey House once remarked upon the paucity of our knowledge concerning sexual behavior in Victorian England. For House the extreme reticence of the Victorians magnified the value of every fragment of evidence pertaining to sexual behavior that scholars uncovered. To fathom the meaning of the extreme reticence itself does not seem to have been particularly relevant to the problem for House. In this paper, which is an analysis of late-Victorian Sexual Respectability, not only the fragmentary sorts of knowledge that House alluded to, but a comparatively unexplored source, medical books, have been made meaningful and interpreted within the frame of reference of the Respectable Social System prevailing in England roughly between 1859 and 1895.

Gegen Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts war das wirtschaftliche Denken so weit fortgeschritten, daß es ein theoretisches System bildete, wobei die Regeln, die beim internationalen Güteraustausch zu beachten sind, formuliert wurden, zur Verwirklichung dessen, was als die natürliche Ordnung des Außenhandels angesehen wurde. Drei Probleme oder Gruppen von Problemen waren bis dahin untersucht worden.

Dialectical idealism as applied to social theory may be provisionally defined as an attempt to explain the evolution of Western society through the use of dialectical forms which rely upon the presumed motive power of spiritual, mental, or ideal forces. These forces are presumed to “realize themselves” in the historical process. Hegel and Fichte, of course, first made such concepts familiar. The mighty influence of Marx and dialectical materialism, which kept the form but not the idealism of the Hegelian dialectic, has accounted for a lasting eclipse of interest in this earlier form of dialectical social thought. It is at least partly a symptom of this general decline of interest in dialectical idealism that the work of Lorenz von Stein has become, until quite recently, all but forgotten to modern scholarship.

Nachdem bereits früher aus den Archiven des IISG. einige Briefe Rosa Luxemburgs und andere die Tätigkeit der Verfasserin in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie betreffende Dokumente veröffentlicht werden konnten, stellen die hier mitgeteilten Briefe eine kleine Nachlese an Luxemburg-Dokumenten dar. Es handelt sich um einen Brief an Minna Kautsky, drei Briefe an Luise Kautsky, ein Schreiben an Hans Kautsky und vier Briefe an Fanny Jezierska. Einer der letzteren enthält die Abschrift eines Schreibens Karl Liebknechts an Fanny Jezierska. Es wurde ferner ein Brief Leo Jogiches' hinzugefügt, weil er für Rosa Luxemburg bestimmte Mitteilungen enthält, die der damals im Berliner “Weibergefängnis” Inhaftierten überbracht wurden.