Austro-Marxism: The Ideology of Unity. Volume II: Changing the World: The Politics of Austro-Marxism (Historical Materialism)

During the first half of the twentieth century, Austrian socialist thinkers—chief among them Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Renner, and Max Adler—emerged from and helped transform Austrian Social Democracy into one of Europe’s best organized and most effective political and social movements.

Through its expertly selected and introduced original documents this wide-ranging volume offers English readers the most thorough effort to date to provide a representative sampling of the Austro-Marxists’ key theoretical ideas. From their controversial thinking on the National Question, to their reflections on the Bolshevik revolution, through their attempts to understand the collapse of their gains under fascist pressure, this volume illustrates the conceptual richness of the entire school of thought.

Mark E. Blum, Ph.D. (1970), University of Pennsylvania, is Professor of History at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. He published books, monographs, and articles on European socialism, including The Austro-Marxists, 1890-1918: A Psychobiographical Study (University of Kentucky, 1985), and most recently, with William Smaldone, Austro-Marxism: The Ideology of Unity, Volume I Austro-Marxist Theory and Strategy (Brill, 2016).

William Smaldone, Ph.D. (1989),SUNY at Binghamton, is Professor of History at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He has published monographs and articles on the history of European socialism, including, most recently, European Socialism: A Concise History with Documents (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).