ABSTRACT
about fifty years ago a History of Socialism and Communism was begun in Germany by a group of the most influential socialist and marxist writers under the direction of Bernstein and Kautsky. It was carried on by the co-operation of specialists in the manner of the national and universal histories composed by learned ‘bourgeois’. When the first volume appeared 1 I was winning my spurs as a writer and objected in an essay that this ‘history’ lacked development and therefore was rather ‘a kind of anthology of all proletarian rebellions and of all the social theories which founded themselves more or less on common ownership’. 2 Had I gone deeper I must have asserted in so many words that communism was essentially incapable of being made the subject of a history.
