ABSTRACT
Using Joseph Bloch's network of bilateral contacts, Catiline—Siegfried hoped to manipulate all elements of revisionism and to consolidate his common ground with all possible allies, his minimum objective being to exert significant influence on opinion-makers within Social Democracy and thus to transform the mood of the masses. To a considerable extent the revisionist phenomenon may be seen as a proletarian parallel to the kind of spontaneous mass revolt which Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn allege to have taken place in the lower middle classes through the patriotic societies and among German Catholics in the Wilhelmine era. Personal factors may also have played a part in Bloch's failure to create the revisionist phalanx which was to capture Social Democracy and then inflict a Gaugamela on those who denied the working class its place in the political nation. Bloch's idealism was always leavened by a hard-headed Machiavellism; Eisner lived and died a Kantian.
