ABSTRACT
Imperial Germany knew no such thing as a revisionist creed or a revisionist movement. Eduard Bernstein's short-term failure and ultimate deification mirrored Joseph Bloch's fate in reverse. Bloch had a programme and a strategy which, by comparison with those of the party centre and the radical left, were based on a realistic assessment of working-class needs and what the situation would allow. Although by no means alone in so doing, Bernstein attempted to provide German socialism with a realistic theory for the gradual transformation of capitalism into a vaguely defined democratic socialism. Although he was never a neo-Kantian, the inspiration behind both his revisionism and his international relations theory was essentially ethical, liberal-democratic and British. Wilhelmine socialism and its 'revisionist' offshoot, considered as a particular response to the challenge of modernity, were as international and multifarious as any other manifestation of modernism.
