Evolutionary socialism and the challenge of British liberal reform, 1890-1914: A study of the views of Jean Jaures, Eduard Bernstein and Ramsay MacDonald.

摘要

In 1909 Jean Jaures, Ramsay MacDonald and Eduard Bernstein, along with most European revisionists, applauded the attempt of the British Liberal David Lloyd George to establish a foundation for a welfare state. These European socialist-reformists contended that social reform through parliament, not the violent destruction of capitalism, ought to be their main concern. Their ultimate goal was the integration of all citizens into a democratic state: reason and the democratization of all levels of government, they believed, could gradually eradicate social inequality. This thesis sheds new light on fin-de-siecle revisionism by demonstrating that prior to 1914 some prominent members of the Second International came simultaneously to see in British New Liberalism a potential tool in their crusades against the injustices brought about by industrial life. Its main argument is that their views on the People's Budget of 1909 ranked among the clearest illustrations of their lifelong efforts to promote reform through a democratic parliamentary process.;For Jean Jaures (1859-1914), Ramsay MacDonald (1886-1937) and Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), parliament was more than an opposition platform: it was one of the main instruments of their humanist faith. By choosing to defend Lloyd George's reforms, all three practised a brand of gradual socialism aimed at achieving concrete results. They shunned abstract postulates and the pursuit of an Elysian future: instead, they sought to remedy directly pressing social problems. Jaures, Bernstein and MacDonald faced the dilemmas shared by all social democrats: they hoped to reconcile their humanism with the realities of politics in the fin-de-siecle era. The congruence of their political ideas following the Dreyfus case, in spite of the differences of the French Third Republic, Imperial Germany and Edwardian England, underscores ideological interactions within the Second International. Through the medium of comparative intellectual biography, this thesis delineates the similar visions of these three leading proponents of evolutionary socialism before the Great War.