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6. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet." Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (London, Peter Halban 1993), p. 92. 7. One problem with Berkowitz's otherwise compelling account is that it occasionally lacks documentary evidence for some of its more sweeping generalizations. Concurrently, some of the proof offered to underpin his conclusions comes from 'tainted', that is, Zionist sources. Berkowitz propounds, for example, that Zionism managed to fix specific images of Palestine as part of Western Jewish consciousness, but does not deliver the requisite source material to reinforce his point (BI, 144). Frequently he makes us believe that trees in Palestine, postcards, or ancient heroes had a vast impact on Jewish consciousness in the West, without, however, citing reliable statistics or non-Zionist contemporaries to make his argument sound more convincing, (BI, 169, 172: BII, 123, 126). Finally, many of the quotes used to illustrate Zionism's effect are Zionist in origin.

PI1:S0191-6599 (97) 00013-2 The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy, Manfred B. Steger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiv + 287 pp.

Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Kevin Anderson (Urbana, 1L: University of Illinois Press, 1995), xix + 311 pp. Although Soviet-style communism is dead, its specter still haunts the socialist camp. During the past decade there has been much discussion among Western socialists about the pedigree of communism, the cause of its death, and how to wipe the blot off the family name. Most on the left were relieved that the old man had finally died, but his character and deeds have not been forgotten, and much advice has been dispensed since the funeral about how to avoid his life of crime. The two books under review add their voices to this debate, for though concerned principally with the history of ideas, each also addresses the larger question of what socialism should be after the death of Soviet communism. Returning to the origins of the great divide in the socialist tradition, when the paths of Social Democracy and Communism diverged, these works explore roads not taken by the socialist movement. The routes suggested, however, lead in opposite directions, blazed as they were by two mortal enemies of turn-of-the-century socialism, Eduard Bernstein and V. I. Lenin. Steger's book on Bernstein is the first full-length treatment of its subject in the English language since Gay's classic study I. Steger's work is more thorough, scholarly, and better documented than Gay's, but also less popular. Essentially a careful description of Bernstein's intellectual evolution over the course of eight decades, the book offers no major revelations or a fundamentally new interpretation, but it does lay greater Stress than other accounts on Bernstein's writings after the publication of The Preconditions of Socialism (1899). That famous treatise was largely negative and critical, a challenging assault on the orthodox Marxism of its day, but in his writings after the turn of the century Bernstein went on to articulate an ethical, neo-Kantian alternative to Marx's realist brand of socialism and also addressed concrete questions of socialist practice. In a separate volume Steger has performed the valuable service of bringing together and translating some of Bernstein's most important writings from this later period 2. Like an explorer, Bernstein is said to have been engaged in a life-long quest for the leftist equivalent of the elusive Northwest Passage: a middle way between liberalism

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and socialism. Influenced in part by his long years of exile in London, Bernstein acquired a keen appreciation for the value of liberal rights and attempted to reconceptualize socialist theory as the logical extension of liberal principles. In itself this was not an original argument, for others before Bernstein had sought to reconcile the two, but Bernstein was the first to make this argument from within the marxist camp, and his efforts not surprisingly provoked a storm of protest that became known as the Revisionist Controversy. More perceptive than many of his critics, Bernstein recognized important liberal elements in Marxist theory, but Steger is right that Bernstein ultimately underestimated the extent of his disagreement with Marx and 'failed to carry his critique through to its logical end, completing his break with Marxism' (155). Bernstein thought that Marxist theory only needed to be revised, but the scale of the revisions for which he called amounted to a conceptual revolution. A gradualist in matters of political practice, Bernstein was paradoxically a revolutionary in the realm of theory. Steger's account of Bernstein's quest is sympathetic, yet he does not hesitate to criticize certain aspects of Bernstein's evolutionary socialism. The most significant problem identified is the aid and comfort Bernstein's theory gave to instrumentalist forces within German Social Democracy, those infected with what Lenin once called 'trade-union consciousness'. Forsaking all progress toward a qualitatively different society, these Praktiker appealed to Bernstein's revisionism in order to justify their status-quo politics. After all, it was Bernstein who had once declared that the final goal was nothing to him in comparison with every forward step of the movement. This slogan notwithstanding, Bernstein himself always insisted on the importance of principles and ideals toward which the movement should strive, but as Steger notes, Bernstein's 'epistemological stance indeed resulted in the SPD Praktiker's excuse to open the door to instrumentalism' (p. 104). 'Bernstein had a poor eye for the tendency of reformism to breed technocrats' (p. 13), and he struggled throughout the latter part of his career with opportunist trends which his own theory helped to foster. Steger's book is likely to be the standard account of Bernstein's thought for years to come. It is reliable, comprehensive, and judicious, but the claim that 'Bernstein's neglected contribution to socialist theory speaks directly to the current process of rethinking the traditional project of the democratic Left' (p. 2) is less convincing. Only a few pages at the end of the book are devoted to this issue, and no vital insight formulated by Bernstein but missing in contemporary democratic theory is identified. If the large body of democratic theory that has emerged in the past several decades is the elusive middle way between liberalism and socialism, as I believe it is, it can proudly claim Bernstein as a forebear, but it has little to learn from him. Both theory and practice have evolved since the turn of the century, as Bernstein himself predicted they would. As Steger notes, one of the features of Bernstein's revisionism that enraged orthodox opponents was his appeal to Kantian principles. The orthodox Marxism of the Second International professed allegiance to Hegel and the dialectic, and condemned the Kantianism of the revisionists as bourgeois idealism. There is reason to doubt, however, how well the Second-International Marxists understood Hegel. In a recent book on the origins of dialectical materialism White has exposed the weaknesses in G.V. Plekhanov's grasp of Hegel, and Plekhanov was the acknowledged expert on Hegel among the orthodox 3. Certainly Plekhanov's Hegelianism looks rather wooden in comparison to the philosophically sophisticated arguments of Georg Lukacs, who is generally viewed as the first authentically Hegelian Marxist since Marx himself. Anderson, however, seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom in Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism. he argues that Lenin was in fact 'the first Hegelian Marxist of the

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twentieth century' (p. 65), and that his 'ambivalent, secretive Hegelianism' (p. 98) profoundly influenced Bolshevik practice during the last decade of Lenin's life. An ambitious and interesting book, Anderson offers a major reinterpretation of Lenin's mature thought. The thesis Anderson attempts to sustain is not original, as he himself admits. The last two chapters of the book document the history of this interpretation since Lenin's death, and Anderson frequently acknowledgeshis debt to Raya Dunayevskaya, who proclaimed the Hegelianism of Lenin's theory and practice in a number of her works 4. Dunayevskaya, however, was more activist than scholar. Anderson therefore sets himself the task of developing and refining Dunayevskaya's thesis in a scholarly fashion, and he has surely made the best possible case for this line of interpretation. The argument that Lenin was decisively influenced by Hegel proceeds from a fact: that Lenin studied Hegel's Science of Logic intensively in the months following the outbreak of the First World War. While the guns roared, Lenin spent the last weeks of 1914 in the peace of a Swiss library patiently filling three notebooks with extracts, commentary, and aphorisms--by far the largest number of pages he ever devoted to any book of which we have a record. After painstakingly reviewing Lenin's notes and comparing them with Hegel's original, Anderson then attempts to show that Lenin's newly acquired appreciation for Hegel and the dialectic shaped his tactics during the war and the first years of the Russian Revolution. The argument is rendered plausible because aspects of Lenin's theory and practice certainly did change after 1914. During the war Lenin worked out his theories of imperialism and the state, and he suddenly began to place special emphasis on the soviets and national liberation movements as levers facilitating socialist revolution. Anderson argues that each of these innovations was inspired in part by Lenin's Hegel studies. What Lenin is said to have learned from The Science of Logic, above all, was how to think dialectically. Under the sway of the mechanistic materialism of the Second International until 1914, Lenin acquired 'a wider, more multi-faceted concept of subjectivity' (p. 256) from Hegel and was moved to search for new dialectical opposites embodying the contradictions of capitalism. One of these opposites is alleged to have been the national liberation movements in the European colonies, which Lenin is said to have portrayed 'as a form of revolutionary subjectivity as important as the labor movement in bringing about revolution' (p. 143). Drawing a sharp contrast between this Hegelian Leninism and the Stalinized version that came to prevail in the Soviet Union, Anderson declares that Lenin 'helped to point the way toward the only type of Marxism that is viable today: one with a multiple concept of subjectivity rather than an exclusive reliance on the traditional industrial working class' (xiv). Anderson, then, attempts to make the difficult case that Lenin's thought remains relevant today and that it possesses an unrecognized emancipatory potential, but like Steger he does not hesitate to criticize his subject. Although Lenin's mature thought is presented as more dialectical, Anderson regrets that Lenin 'never worked out a newer, more dialectical concept of organization' (p. 166). 'The notion of a dialectical view of the world developed in his Hegel Notebooks was kept in a compartment separate from one major aspect of his reality, the concept of the party to lead' (p. 168). The vanguard theory of the party set forth in What Is To Be Done? was never abandoned by Lenin, Anderson claims, and to it he attributes the authoritarian tendencies of the Bolshevik regime. If Lenin had only been more consistently dialectical he could have avoided this error, however, and Anderson therefore urges contemporary socialists to take up and develop the more Hegelian and humanist side of Lenin's thought. As indicated above, Anderson makes the strongest possible case for the claim that

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Lenin became a Hegelian marxist after 1914, but the argument nonetheless remains unconvincing. The case rests fundamentally on a coincidence--that Lenin studied Hegel at the very time that his tactics began to change--but little evidence is offered that Lenin's Hegel studies directly shaped these new tactics. In the entire section on State and Revolution, for instance, Anderson cannot cite a single piece of evidence for the claim that the Hegel Notebooks informed Lenin's discussion of council democracy (p. 148-164). The argument in that chapter is based entirely on supposition and extrapolation from abstract dialectical principles to which Lenin allegedly subscribed. It is simply unconvincing to construe Lenin as a Hegelian marxist in the tradition of marx's early humanist writings. Lenin was not a humanist, and he himself never claimed to be more than 'a materialist friend of Hegelian dialectics'. What is more, Anderson misunderstands what the dialectic meant to Lenin in practice and how it shaped his tactics. Anderson treats the dialectic as a metaphysical doctrine consisting of abstract rules like the law of contradiction, the identity of opposites, and so forth. While it is true that Lenin himself speaks this way in his philosophical writings, the conception of the dialectic set forth in his tactical writings is the very antithesis of a body of abstract laws with universal applicability. When he actually claimed to be thinking dialectically about policy Lenin invariable characterized the dialectic as a principle of practical wisdom enjoining suspicion of universal rules. As he explained in a 1904 essay, 'the ABC of dialectics ... tells us that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete '5. Lenin's point was that a dialectical politics resists universal solutions to concrete problems. It acknowledges the importance of circumstance and dictates tactical flexibility. Anderson misses this crucial dimension of Lenin's dialectic, chiefly because he ignores Lenin's tactical writings before 1914. Only Lenin's few philosophical works prior to the First World War are examined, and as a result Anderson remains unaware of the pervasive discourse of the dialectic to be found in Lenin's pre-war articles and pamphlets. The conception of the dialectic set forth there is not especially Hegelian, and this understanding persisted even after Lenin's Hegel studies. Thus there is abundant evidence in Lenin's corpus that he possessed a different, nonHegelian understanding of the practice of dialectical thinking throughout his career, but Anderson remains oblivious to it because he does not systematically review Lenin's pre-war writings. As for Anderson's claim that Lenin pointed the way toward a multiple concept of subjectivity, that too is unconvincing. Lenin was a sngle-minded proletarian socialist who subordinated all other emancipatory movements to his cause. Although flexible on the question of tactical alliances, Lenin did not view national liberation movements as a form of revolutionary subjectivity as important as the labor movement in bringing about revolution. These movements were instead a resource to be exploited. If they furthered the proletarian cause they were to be supported, but Lenin always warned of the bourgeois danger inherent in nationalist movements. His very dialectical sensibilities prevented him from turning national liberation into a principle, for the only fixed principle of the dialectic according to Lenin was the interest of the working class. Despite Anderson's efforts, it is quite doubtful that Lenin can be saved or made the source of socialist regeneration. More than any other socialist, Lenin is responsible for the blot on the family name. Through his authoritarian and statist policies Lenin did irrepearable damage to the socialist cause. Any socialism that hopes for a future within a democratic society must be rigorously anti-Leninist. Robert Mayer

Loyola University, Chicago, IL, U.S.A.

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1. Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (New York: Columbia Universty Press, 1952). 2. Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900-1921, edited and translated by Manfred Steger (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanites Press, 1996). 3. James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 319-325. 4. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: from 1776 until Today (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964); and Philosophy and Revolution." From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (Atlantic Heights, N J: Humanities Press, 1973). 5. V.I. Lenin, 'Reply to Rosa Luxemburg', in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), vol. 7, p. 476.

PIhSOI91-6599(97) O0017-X Pluralism and the Personality of the State, David Runciman (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 'Ideas in Context', 279 pp, £35.00, ISBN 0-521-551919-9 This is a welcome book. While there has recently been a marked revival of interest in the English pluralist school, Runciman's careful scholarship enables him to engage in a lively historical and theoretical debate with the major pluralist thinkers of the two first decades of the twentieth century. He takes us on a lengthy, sometimes arcane journey from Thomas Hobbes to Ernest Barker, via the German historian Otto von Gierke and the British pluralists, Maitland, Figgis, Cole and Laski. The central theme of the 'personality' of collective entities (the state and social groups) provides him both with a historical thread and an interesting philosophical problem. Although Runciman concludes that the pluralists did little more than elaborate 'unsatisfactory solutions to a set of intractable problems' (p. 263), his study offers a meticulous reconstitution of a fascinating intellectual enterprise, that of the tentative adaptation of the Germanist idea of group personality to English intellectual traditions. In what may seem to be an unlikely starting point, the study opens with an analysis of Chapter XVI of Leviathan. There, Hobbes lays out his theory of fictitious persons, suggesting that the sovereign is one of them. To the crucial question as to what or who such a non-natural person represents, Hobbes answers 'the person of the Commonwealth'. Therefore, Runciman suggests, Hobbes's state cannot be defined as a mere societas, in Oakeshott's terms, for it seems to require 'a personal identity of its own in the world of action that in inhabits' (p. 16). Yet Hobbes's individualistic interpretation of the social contract prevents him from giving any substance to the 'intangible fiction' (p. 18) of the state, since the multitude of original contractors never becomes one person prior to their being represented by the sovereign. Runciman argues that the Hobbesian account is ambiguous: it asserts that group personality can only be 'recognized' by the state (in line with Hobbes's hostility to lesser corporations); yet the state is the one person that is not 'authorized' by any pre-existing entity. A firmer definition of the personality of the state would have suggested to Hobbes the conditions not merely for legal, but also for moral order. The nineteenth-century German historian, Gierke, sought such a moral order in a more expansive conception of collective personality than Hobbes. The book describes how, against the Romanist conception of societas and universitas, Gierke championed