The Trouble with Reality: World Appropriation and World View in the Lives and Works of Leading Marxists 1871-1914

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The fusion of theory and practice based on the 'radical study of reality' (Karl Marx) was central thought and final goal of the Marxist worldview. My project seeks to reconstruct the experiences and encounters of nine leading Marxist politicians with the living and working conditions of workers during the late 19th and early 20th century in four European countries: Germany, Austria, France, and Russia. It investigates how these Marxists evaluated and integrated these experiences into their theoretical and political-practical writings. Focusing on concrete references to reality and the concurrent individual modes of appropriating reality documented in the relevant sources, mainly ego-documents and political writings, my project takes Marxisms programmatic recourse to reality seriously: it seeks to go beyond the mere theory-focused intellectual history of Marxism, it revisits the genealogy of this political idea in context of the individual life-worlds (Lebenswelten) and aims at analyzing the interplay between world appropriation or cognition (Weltaneignung) and world view (Weltanschauung) in the lives and works of its leading protagonists. The analysis focuses on those nine European Marxists who, both theoretically and political-practically, had risen to leadership positions in the social democratic movement of their respective country: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Jean Jaures, Jules Guesde, Georgij V. Plechanow, Wladimir I. Lenin und Pjotr B. Struve. It is the aim of this study to probe the obvious but little explored nexus between world appropriation and worldview. Inspired by the observation that all protagonists by their mid-thirties had achieved a leading position within their party or movement and had published some of their most influential texts, my analysis focuses on the individual socialization into Marxism up until adulthood. It will mainly discuss whether and in which ways the individual mode of world appropriation (i.e. inductive-deductive, flexible-rigid, spontaneous-deliberate) shaped and determined a political world view and the methods and means of political practice. Which connection existed, after all, between a 'sense of reality' (Isaiah Berlin) and what one could call political temper - is it reasonable to claim, for example: the more theoretical the head, the more radical the hand?