Abstract

An unnerving parallel to the latest crisis of the Left gently ambushes the reader long before the last page of Rabinbach's monograph has been turned. Between 1904 and 1914 a group of sharp, well-read, generously thoughtful University of Vienna men created a form of Marxism “which has perhaps made more original contributions to die history of the doctrine than any other” — an intellectual and political program tensely poised between orthodox revisionism and Bolshevism. Then, over the next 20 years, they resolutely marched into historical oblivion by paying less attention to “petty tactical artifices” than to elegant thought on behalf of their Utopia, a Bildungsgemeinschaft sans politics.