ABSTRACT
The intellectual legacy that Karl Marx had left to future social thinkers was both untidy and ambiguous. By the 1890's it was no longer possible to dismiss him as just another proletarian agitator: the size of the political parties that recognized him as their prophet and the seriousness of the economic investigations that he had initiated had made him a massive force that demanded to be related in some way or other to the major traditions of European thought. Marx himself, of course, had thought he was both, and had argued that the two aspects of his activity were necessarily inseparable. It was not necessarily true, for example, that Marx's theory of history pointed inexorably to socialism, or that the inevitable triumph of socialism which he had postulated implied that one felt any moral compulsion to hasten that victory. On the political plane, the antithesis expressed itself as a conflict within the European Socialist parties between "revisionists" or "reformists".
