After the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, Karl Kautsky — sometimes called the “pope of Marxism” — was widely considered the most authoritative interpreter of Marx’s thought.

Author of influential texts such as The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx and The Road to Power, Kautsky was also founder and editor of the review Die Neue Zeit and co-author of the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD’s) Erfurt Program.

Today, however, Kautsky is mainly read today as a negative example of a mechanical and deterministic thinker. Given Lenin’s scathing work “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” Kautsky’s grandson even recalls meeting scholars at conferences who thought his grandfather’s first name was “Renegade.”