Once deemed ‘the pope of Marxism’,¹ Karl Kautsky – a star pupil of Marx and Engels in his youth – was the leading theoretician behind the German Social Democratic Party’s original course of decisive hostility and implacable opposition to the German Empire (1871–1918) and the capitalist state in general. He was also one of the most prolific public intellectuals of his time. Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky came to be viewed by friend and foe alike as the most important Marxist thinker of the age. He not only made significant contributions to the theoretical development of Marxism, but also popularised Marxist ideas, bringing them to a much wider international audience than either Marx or Engels was ever in a position to reach.² Kautsky was, moreover, a key actor when the question of state power was posed to the forces of German social democracy for the first time: during the dissolution of the war-weary Imperial state and the emergence of the Weimar Republic. His literary and political activity can accordingly be viewed as an important piece in the mosaic of social-democratic writing on the German Empire in particular and on the state and civil society in general. However, despite his once exalted status as a champion of Marxism in its golden age, there is little interest in Kautsky’s work today. In the past quarter of a century, only eight German- and English-language studies devoted to his ideas have appeared (and five of these focus less on the detail of his political philosophy than on his practical-political influence). In the recent past, more of his correspondence has been published,³ but the overwhelming majority of his letters, papers and drafts remains neglected in the Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam.

This book aims to rekindle interest in Kautsky’s ideas by exploring one central aspect of his thought – his democratic-republican understanding of state and society.

My introductory outline of Kautsky’s democratic-republican thought will be composed of four main sections. It will first provide a short overview of Kautsky’s life and work and then discuss the development of research on Kautsky over the past one hundred years, tracing the key trends and advances in the study of his life and work and outlining the main reasons behind the marginalisation of his thought. Second, it will evaluate the democratic foundations of Kautsky’s republicanism through a discussion of the SPD’s Erfurt Programme of 1891, which he co-authored and which pithily outlines the aims and principles of the social-democratic movement in Germany, and Parliamentarism, Direct Legislation by the People and Social Democracy (1893), in which he develops his views on parliament and modern democracy. On this basis, it will then consider how Kautsky’s interpretation of democracy feeds into his republican conception of political thought. The material on which this chapter is based will be Kautsky’s series of articles The Republic and Social Democracy in France (1905), which has been almost completely ignored in the secondary literature. Finally, some concluding thoughts will be offered.

My discussion of Kautsky’s democratic republicanism will be followed by the first English-language translations of Parliamentarism, Direct Legislation by the People and Social Democracy and The Republic and Social Democracy in France. In order to provide an overview of how Kautsky viewed his own intellectual development, the volume also includes my translation of his autobiographical essay, The Development of a Marxist (1924). Finally, my translation of the pivotal⁴ Erfurt programme and its various drafts has been appended to the volume.

Besides providing a distinct contribution to the study of Kautsky’s life and work and helping to correct the general – and, as we shall see, fairly negative – consensus on his status as a theorist, this publication is motivated by a desire to explore the ideological relationship between Marxism and democracy through the eyes of an important partisan of both. For some, such as the esteemed historian William Carr, Marx and Engels disdained popular democracy. Carr contends that they thought ‘universal suffrage would probably put another Napoleon in power’.⁵ This study will contest such views by framing Kautsky’s politics within what August J. Nimtz has described as Marx and Engels’s unique contribution to ‘the democratic breakthrough’ of the nineteenth century,⁶ or, to paraphrase the words of the Communist Manifesto, their effort to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class so as to win the battle of democracy.⁷