'The Movement is Everything:' Realism and Idealism in the Revisionismusstreit

• In Event: Radical, Utopian and Transformative Thought in Political Realism

Abstract

Theorists seeking to advance a political theory that is both realist and radical have struggled with realism’s skepticism of utopianism. Where conservative realists argue that utopianism makes demands of politics beyond what is possible, radical realists see utopianism as a form of ideological distraction from actually transformative modes of critique. But are the two approaches truly irreconcilable? Must utopianism be unrealistic? This paper excavates the efforts of a prior generation of radicals to reconcile radical ideals with realistic critique in the so-called Revisionismusstreit in Marxism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tracing the origins of this controversy to Marx and Engels’ critique of utopian socialisms, it then turns to the efforts of a group of Neo-Kantians to distinguish their own efforts to advance socialism as an ideal from utopian forms of socialism decried as wishful thinking. For these thinkers, the key point to take away from Kant was that practical reasoning relies on ends we set for ourselves; we need ideals, not utopias, to orient ourselves in contexts of plurality and contingency. I trace Eduard Bernstein’s initially insightful critiques of Orthodox Marxism as they transformed into what I argue was aa weaker and more orthodox Kantianism. Still, even as Bernstein’s attempts to solve the problems he identified faltered, his critiques provided the impetus for yet lesser known figures to bring Kant into conversation with Marx. Contextualizing these debates within the politics of fin-de-siècle Germany, I show how they provided different avenues for theorizing how ideals and utopianisms could—and could not—motivate popular movements for emancipation.

Author

• William Levine, University of Chicago