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, constitutional means by contesting elections and ultimately being voted into power. Once in government they would enact socialism via the normal legal processes. These ideas developed out of the German Social Democratic Party from the middle of the century. An important figure here was Eduard Bernstein, who joined the SDP in 1872 and soon became one of its leading journalists. In Evolutionary Socialism (1898) he argued for reform
parties, groups and factions among which ferocious quarrels of interpretation and reinterpretation soon began. The German Social Democratic Party (SDP), the largest and most significant socialist party in Europe by the 1870s, was divided over ‘revisionism’, which was a reworking of Marxism associated with Eduard Bernstein. He argued that a socialist society could be brought about without violent revolution by political action
’, Socialist History , 32 (2008), 1–17; J. P. Nettl, ‘The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as a Political Model’, Past and Present , 30 (1965), 65–95. 7 Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 134. 8 R. H. Tawney, ‘The Choice before the
Europe, symbolising the new approach to government and international relations promoted by Gorbachev. The two concepts galvanised a reform process throughout Central and Eastern Europe and eventually helped to overthrow Communist rule in these countries and in the Soviet Union itself. [See also: perestroika] Godesberg Programme The new basic programme of the West German Social
