Scholarly Socialists During The Second International

Socialism became a mass movement in many European countries about the time of the heyday of the Second International. Many leaders of these movements and those struggling for leadership produced works of scholarship, albeit often with an activist spirit. I think of, for example:

• Eduard Bernstein. The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks for Social Democracy.
• Nikolai Bukharin. The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class.
• Richard B. Day and Daniel F. Guido (eds.). 2018. Responses to Marx's Capital. Brill
• Rudolph Hilferding. Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx.
• Rudolph Hilferding. Finance Capital.
• Karl Kautsky. The Social Revolution.
• Karl Kautsky. The Path to Power.
• Antonio Labriola. Essays on the Materialist Conception of History.
• Rosa Luxemburg. The Accumulation of Capital.
• G. V. Plekhanov. The Development of the Monist Theory of History.
• George Bernard Shaw (ed.). Fabian Essays in Socialism.
• Georges Sorel. Reflections on Violence.

I do not give copyright dates because I am unsure of the publication dates of some in the original german, italian, or russian. The Day and Guido work is a collections of essays from the time. This is hardly a comprehensive list of the literature of the period. All of these works, published before the October revolution, take Marx as serious and important. The authors were not academics, but I am not sure that there was a solid border between academia and politics at the time. Socialists, in works of scholarship, engaged with those developing the then new-fangled marginalist economic theory.

Collections

• Jukka Gronow. 2016. On the Formation of Marxism. Brill.
• M. C. Howard and J. E. King. 1989. A History of Marxian Economics, vol. 1. Princeton.
• Ian Steedman (ed.). 1995. Socialism and Marxism in Economics: 1870 - 1930. Routledge.