ABSTRACT
Weber's intellectual development clearly owed a great deal to a dialogue with the ideas of Marx - or, to be more accurate, a dialogue with the theories of those 'vulgar' Marxists who found a home in German Social Democracy before the First World War and whose representative spokesman was Karl Kautsky. Weber also revealed considerable interest in the development of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), regretted its isolation and persecution in Wilhelmine society, and yet was thoroughly critical of the party's immobilism and dogmatic faith in an inevitable triumph of socialism. 1 Yet it is fair to say that this interest was not directly reciprocated by Kautsky and his colleagues. Significantly, the great theoretical debates of German Social Democracy took place within the socialist camp, further testifying to its isolation and introspection. It was to Bernstein, rather than to 'bourgeois' critics, that Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg responded. However, the fact that Weber constructed a critique of 'orthodox' Marxism, and that this critique was in many respects similar to that of the high-priest of 'revisionism', enables us to construct a kind of dialogue between him and the theorists of the SPD. The Weberian critique centred on the claims of 'scientific' socialism, on a refutation of the theories of immiseration, class polarization and inevitable crisis, and a rejection of the strategic consequences of such a prognosis, namely the strategy of proletarian isolation and self-reliance.
