ABSTRACT
The stability in the party leadership in Germany is very striking to the historian when he compares it with what has happened in the working-class parties elsewhere in Europe. The Italian socialist party, indeed, for the same reasons as in Germany, has exhibited a similar stability. In Germany, it may be said that the socialist leaders live in the party, grow old and die in its service. In addition to these few who have completely abandoned socialism, there are some, after working on behalf of the party for a time, have left politics to devote their energies to other fields. Leadership is indefinitely retained, not because it is the tangible expression of the relationships between the forces existing in the party at any given moment, but simply because it is already constituted. In the leadership, that is to say in the ministry, of the socialist party sociologists see the same persons occupying the same posts for forty years in succession.
