Socialist Faiths

Dorrien’s book focuses on two countries where democratic socialism took hold and wielded enormous influence: the United Kingdom and Germany. It’s a sensible choice, highlighting both the diversity of European socialist movements and the fact that even in rival nationalities, many of the problems socialists faced were universal.

The nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries marked a complex era for European socialism. Starting out as a very utopian dream by industrialists like Robert Owen and economists like Henri de Saint-Simon, socialism gradually became a major political movement that believed it held the keys to the future. By the advent of World War I, significant socialist parties and intellectuals were active in England, Germany, and many other countries. By the end of World War II, many of them had assumed positions of power. In these roles, socialists and social democrats introduced many of the reforms that have since become entrenched parts of each county’s social contract. Examples include Clement Atlee’s government establishing the National Health Service to Willy Brandt fostering power-sharing like codetermination among major West German companies.

All of this was theorized, debated, and defended by a colorful array of left intellectuals committed, for overlapping reasons, to democratic socialism. Dorrien’s book emphasizes the broad spectrum of personalities, each with their unique motivations, that have vested their intellectual and spiritual hopes in socialism. This spectrum encompassed militant atheists and “scientific socialists” like Karl Kautsky, deeply religious Christians such as R. H. Tawney and Paul Tillich, mild-mannered reformists like Eduard Bernstein, and cynical revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin.

In Dorrien’s telling, this ideological diversity has been both a strength and a weakness of European socialist movements. On the one hand, it enabled the Left to make the case for socialism to a wide array of classes and communities. On the other hand, it often led to acrimonious infighting, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) split that took place after and during the German Revolution of 1918. The world’s most prestigious socialist party broke apart over whether to conciliate with bourgeois institutions, pursue dramatic but still peaceful reforms, or engage in a Bolshevik-style total revolution. The resulting wounds hadn’t healed by the time the Nazis took power, leading a divided left too weak to effectively resist the rise of fascism.

As a theologian, Dorrien naturally places more emphasis than usual on the “religious roots of European socialism.” This is a worthy decision, since the story of European socialism’s roots in Christian and Jewish thought is less familiar than many others. In the United Kingdom religious socialism was founded by clerics Frederick Denison Maurice, John Ludlow, Charles Kingsley, and their followers. It was undoubtedly moralistic and often very middle class, railing against the injustices of industrial poverty and capitalism’s reverence for the rich.

In Dorrien’s telling, English Christian socialism was also notably more practical than its German counterpart, culminating in the lucid prose and Labour Party activism of ethical socialists like Tawney. In Germany, the context of Christian socialism presented both more promising opportunities and more formidable challenges. The SPD frequently secured the position of the largest party, even in the face of serious repression and outright bans. However, the ascension of Hitler abruptly halted this trajectory, demanding an unprecedented intellectual and moral intensity from theologians, a circumstance unparalleled in the liberalizing atmosphere of the United Kingdom.

As a result, German Christian socialist thinking, led by towering figures like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, produced intellectual output with a comparative grandeur. Their advocacy for socialist reforms coexisted with the creation of enormous multivolume theological works. In contrast, the United Kingdom, while witnessing the Labour Party’s initiation of social democratic reform, never fully broke the Conservatives’ hold on power as the “natural governing” party of the country.

Dorrien is a superb storyteller and eminently fair. Throughout the historical narrative, he does his best to distil the essence of each personality by examining their intellectual and spiritual contributions without editorializing or taking sides — except on rare occasions (more on that in a minute). Intriguingly, this approach yields a somewhat melancholic tone, as the prevailing sentiment is a desire to gently reconcile the greater unity of present socialist thought with a past riven by division.

Karl Marx, the Specter Haunting Democratic Socialism

Marx’s complex legacy is, of course, the most intricate challenge in Dorrien’s book. Dorrien rightly stresses how Marxian theory

is the most creative and sophisticated tradition of anti-capitalist criticism ever devised. Marx argued powerfully that capitalism is not the most natural way to organize society, he stressed that capitalism was founded on the dispossession of peasants and the poor from their land, facilitating “primitive accumulation,” and he focused brilliantly on the question of who produces and who receives the surplus value. This critique so far surpassed all others that very different schools of socialist thought felt compelled to appropriate it.

However, determining what it makes for socialists to “appropriate” Marx — the ultimate intellectual appropriator — has always been a challenging question. Does it mean adopting his outlook wholesale and arguing for socialism’s scientific status, as Engels did in his classic popularization of Marxist theory, Anti-Dühring? If so, which periods of Marx’s work should be considered, and how should one reconcile the transitions and contradictions in his philosophy?

At times, Marx undeniably wrote like an economic determinist, subscribing to a teleological vision of history in which the triumph of communism was inevitable if one just waited long enough. For instance, the preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy lays out a classic depiction of the “economic base” and the “legal and political superstructure” and describes the latter as mostly determined by the former. But anyone who reads Capital or the Grundrisse recognizes that, even if powerful and clarifying, Marx was well aware that this position was too simplistic and one-sided to be truly dialectical.

As Engels put it in an 1890 letter, both he and Marx were

partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

This problem, along with others, has continued to haunt Marxist thought and socialism more broadly, sparking some venomous debates. In The Preconditions of Socialism Eduard Bernstein argued that Marx was wrong to incorporate teleological language about the movement of history into his system, which seemed to carry traces of residual idealism. In the wake of this insight, two things became clear. Firstly, the projected revolutionary victory of the proletariat and the final transition to communism were by no means guaranteed. Secondly, this opened the possibility of achieving a transition to socialism through alternative means, such as democratic reform and even reconciliation with liberal institutions and principles.

This stance infuriated committed revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and disappointed Bernstein’s friend Karl Kautsky, both of whom vehemently opposed reformism and liberalization. In the United Kingdom Marx’s influence was initially minimal, with most socialists finding him too rigid, too German, and too afraid of normative arguments and blueprints — what Marx famously described as “trash” and writing “recipes for the cook shops of the future.” When a significant British Marxist tradition did emerge, it was marked by a cautious approach to notions of revolutionary violence and “democratic centralism.” As such it became a significant and valuable subtradition with Western Marxism.

The Map Is Not the Territory

The Marx debate is one of the few areas where Dorrien does express some editorial perspective. While he displays enormous respect for Marx’s theoretical talents and commanding imagination, it becomes evident that he thinks the sheer force of Marx’s personality and his outlook can be constraining. This limitation, according to Dorrien, may overshadow other valuable traditions of socialist thought. Notably, religious socialism receives special attention, given its complex relationship with Marx’s early depiction of religions as the “opiate of the masses, the heart of a heartless world” that will dissolve when the social conditions which give birth to alienation disappear.

In my view Dorrien is correct on this front, although for somewhat different reasons. Marx was undoubtedly a figure of genius, and ignoring his work entails a significant loss for any leftist thinker. His critique of modernity remains unsurpassed, and his analysis of the diverse forms of power and domination that emerge under capitalism continues to generate fresh insights as exemplified most recently by Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. Marx’s phenomenological account of the way social forms induce ideological and fetishistic “real abstractions,” occluding reality, is profound.

Yet, Marx himself was a creative and autodidactic thinker, who drew ideas liberally from a variety of important predecessors and synthesized them in his own intellect through concrete engagement with material conditions. To authentically follow in his spirit, we must adopt a similarly creative approach in our thinking, avoiding dogmatic treatments of Marx and Marxism as objects of fetishistic idolatry.

Gary Dorrien’s Social Democracy in the Making is an indispensable work that goes a long way toward setting the record straight on the canon of socialist thought. It avoids fixating on just one or two well-known figures, instead showcasing an intellectual and activist tradition that is as diverse as it is often admirable. Beyond its scholarly value, books like Dorrien’s help us recover insights that have been too long buried and provide examples of diverse approaches to socialism. According to Dorrien, socialists dreamed of a “fully democratized society in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. The founders of Social Democracy believed that capitalism is antagonistic toward democracy and only socialism is truly democratic.”

This noble dream, deserving of our loyalty, was one that, as Dorrien suggests toward the end of his book, faded with the transition from the era of the welfare state to the dominance of neoliberalism. Contemporary dreamers of social democratic ideals must glean lessons not only from the tradition’s accomplishments, but, more crucially, from its failures. To prevail in the struggle for a just world, democratic socialists will need to display the same energy and imagination as our predecessors.