(originally published on H-German 1 November 1995)
To both his contemporaries and later historians, Kurt Eisner has been an enigma. He played a prominent role in the pre-World War I Social Democratic Party, serving as a major contributor to and then editor of Vorwärts, and had a brief though significant tenure as head of the Bavarian government during the Revolution of 1918/19, a position that led to his tragic death at the hands of a right-wing assassin early in 1919. Despite his prominent positions, Eisner has long been castigated as a dreamer, an intellectual with no political sense, an overly sentimental philisophe or worse, as Freya Eisner recounts at the outset of her very interesting article. Given the charges against him, Eisner had a difficult time finding a place anywhere in the SPD with its diffuse and contradictory combination of materialist philosophy, bread-and-butter politics, and intransigent radicalism.
Freya Eisner, the author also of a book-length study of her subject and of many articles, strives to defend Kurt Eisner from his detractors and to promote his ideas and politics as a serious contribution to the socialist tradition. Her efforts are a resounding success. Without overlooking a number of Eisner's serious political and intellectual weaknesses, she argues that he creatively synthesized neo-Kantian ethics with a Marxian-based understanding of the inequities of the class system inscribed in capitalist societies. He rejected the dogmatism and determinism of the SPD left and the immobilisme of the right and center, neither of which, the author implies, offered many prospects for serious political progress. Instead, Eisner promoted a philosophy of action that remained attentive to the need to expand socialism's support beyond its proletarian base. Along with a number of other recent studies, Freya Eisner's article should provoke, finally, a serious reconsideration of the pre-war SPD. The conventional tripartite division of the party into left (Luxemburg), right (Bernstein and the unions), and center (Kautsky), while useful, obscures the variety of positions and, possibly, the diverse social base that characterized the SPD in Wilhelmine Germany.
Eisner was born into a Jewish merchant family in Berlin. He sought an academic career, but his father's precarious financial situation forced him to abandon his studies after he had begun work on his dissertation. He soon found a position as a copy editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and on the side wrote reviews and miscellaneous articles. His journalistic career advanced, rather fatefully, with an appointment as political editor of the Hessische Landeszeitung, located in Marburg. His already existing ethical commitments were strengthened by his contacts with the Marburg school, the center of the neo-Kantian movement. He attended Hermann Cohen's lectures and the two soon struck up a lively exchange. Eisner, firmly enmeshed in Enlightenment thought, believed that no essential conflict existed between the individual and society, and that the goal of an ethically-based socialism was to bring the two into harmony. Hence, he fervently attacked all strands of individualist thought, from Nietzschean to liberalism to anarchism, as egotistical and destructive. Kantianism provided Eisner, as it did the Marburgers, with the intellectual tools to critique existing conditions and to posit an alternative based on ethics and reason. Cohen identified Kant as the originator of German socialism, a position that went too far for Eisner and many others (417). But Eisner shared with the Marburgers a general orientation that sought to combine neo-Kantian ethics with the socialist critique of capitalist society. As Kurt Eisner argued at the time and Freya Eisner subsequently, the revisionists around Bernstein were not the sole purveyors of an ethically-based socialism in the SPD. Indeed, both subject and author argue that Bernstein seriously misunderstood and misappropriated neo-Kantianism.
Eisner had been sentenced to prison in 1897 for Majestätsbeleidigung. He joined the SPD the following year, and Wilhelm Liebknecht offered him a position as a political editor with Vorwärts. Upon Liebknecht's death in 1900, Eisner took over the editorship of the paper. Until his dismissal in 1905, he had a major forum in which he could expound his ideas, and one of the strengths of Freya Eisner's essay is her identification of many unsigned articles as the work of Kurt Eisner. He commented, of course, on all the major events and debates of the day -- the revisionism controversy, budget battles, imperialism and war -- from the vantage point of his neo-Kantian/socialist synthesis. Importantly -- and here he also differed from the revisionists and dominant party direction -- he pleaded for a kind of philosophy of praxis, a daily, forceful politics of action. Capitalism would not automatically and gradually grow into socialism (the center and right position). The demise of capitalism was inevitable, but socialism, an ethical ideal, could only be realized through human action. This kind of socialist ideology, the author argues, had strong affinities with the thinking of Jean Jaurès and the Austro-Marxists, and here she may be pointing to the need for a reconsideration not just of the pre-war SPD, but of Second International socialism in general.
Eisner joined the USPD during the war, and his "middle position," as Freya Eisner categorizes it, had its moments of success in Bavaria and in the first efforts to reconstitute the Second International. Eisner sought to combine a council system with parliamentary democracy, institute a mixed economy, and democratize the state bureaucracy. He condemned the politics of force exercised by both the Bolsheviks and the SPD. Increasingly, though, he found himself squeezed from all sides, and he was on his way to resign when he was murdered.
Some seventy-five years after his assassination, perhaps Eisner has finally found an audience for his ethically-based socialism. As with the current flurry of interest in Hannah Arendt in Germany and the United States and the Camus revival in France, the late twentieth century seems to be an amenable time for politically-engaged thinkers who do not fit the conventional categories.