Abstract
Kautsky was born in Prague on 16 October 1854 and died in Amsterdam on 17 October 1938. Marxist thinker and writer, leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Second International, he studied law and arts in Vienna. Fascinated by the theories of Marx and Engels (both of whom he met and befriended in London in 1881), Kautsky must be credited with the spread and development of their ideas in all his embodiments — as a prodigal and versatile columnist; as founder and editor (1883–1917) of the SPD theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit which soon became the chief Marxist forum in Europe; as editor of Marx’s books and unfinished manuscripts (Kautsky edited them in three volumes called Theorien über den Mehrwert, which appeared in 1905–10); and also as socialist thinker. Kautsky presented his ideas systematically in Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (1927), expounding a theory of social development which combined Marx’s and Engels’s historical materialism with Darwin’s naturalism.
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Selected Works
1887. Karl Marx’s Okonomische Lehren. Stuttgart.
1899. Agrarfrage, Eine Ubersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirtschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart.
1901–2. Kriesentheorien. Neue Zeit, Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5.
1902. Die soziale Revolution. Berlin. Trans. by J.B. Askew as The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Revolution, London: Twentieth Century Press, 1903.
1905–10. (ed.) K. Marx, Theorien über den Mehrserf.
1910. Vermehrung und Entwicklung in Natur und Gesellschaft. Stuttgart.
1922. Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm. Trans. by H.J. Stenning as The Labour Revolution, New York: Dial Press, 1925.
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Kowalik, T. (1990). Karl Kautsky. In: Eatwell, J., Milgate, M., Newman, P. (eds) Marxian Economics. The New Palgrave. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20572-1_33
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