Thinking Like a Radical: Social Democracy, Moderation, and Anti-Radicalism

ABSTRACT

The concepts of “radicalism” and “extremism” have been the focus of increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but, surprisingly, there has not been the same kind of effort to specify their opposites, such as the concept of “moderation.” In this article I argue that because “radicalism” and “extremism” have been defined in generally negative terms, we may deepen and refine our understanding of moderation once we are equipped with a more neutral conception of radicalism. Accordingly, I propose a new approach to the study of radical ideologies by comparing them to literary genres. Just as literary genres use tropes that constrain our reading of a text, radical ideologies use tropes—as, for example, the Marxists’ use of “reactionary” or “bourgeois”—that refer to a much wider background dichotomy, on which they base their arguments to discredit those of their opponents or to reinforce those of their supporters. Using this approach, I show how the Marxist theorist and leading German politician Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932)—one of the founders of modern Social Democracy—made a step-by-step critique of the Social Democratic Party’s orthodox Marxist tropes and core narrative that thoroughly undermined their arguments. Bernstein, I further suggest, was a particularly good example of a political moderate because he did not altogether reject the claims of his radical Marxist opponents but rather accepted those parts of their reasoning that he considered valid. By thus opening the way for constructing an anti-radical Marxist narrative, Bernstein’s example shows how moderates can “steal a page” from the radicals’ playbook to create alternative narratives whose central opponents are the radicals themselves. I conclude by briefly discussing two contemporary thinkers—Norberto Bobbio and Karl Popper—who went further than Bernstein in the development of a fully fleshed anti-radical narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• moderation
• radicalism
• extremism
• Marxism
• Eduard Bernstein

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Natalie Moreira for her help with this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. For a recent overview, see Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, 125–44; see also Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, esp. the “Epilogue.” More concretely, see, for instance, Brennan, Libertarianism; and Brennan, Vossen, and Schmidtz, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism.

^2. The success of Syriza in Greece and of Podemos in Spain were major factors behind this trend. See Katsambekis, “Radical Left Populism in Contemporary Greece,” 391–403; Kioupkiolis, “Podemos: The Ambiguous Promises,” 99–120; and Stavrakaki and Katsambekis, “Left-wing Populism,” 119–42.

^3. On populism, see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism, 6. Mudde’s definition of populism has changed slightly, cf. Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” 27–47; and Müller, What is Populism? For some classic studies on the far-right, see Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right; McGann and Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe; and Norris, Radical Right.

^4. Part of the reason behind this wave also has to do with the fact that “identity politics,” originally understood in its minority rights variants, increasingly came to encompass the “nationalist” identity politics that irrupted with the nativist explosion of 2016. See, for instance, Jardina, White Identity Politics. For a work favorable to the minority rights variant, see Stout, The Case for Identity Politics. The identity politics of minority rights variant has generated strong reactions. See, for instance, a more cursory treatment geared toward a popular audience in Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories. For a more sustained critical engagement, see McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics.

^5. Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, offers a left-liberal perspective, and Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, an anti-liberal conservative perspective.

^6. There is a good literature review on disinformation, social media, and polarization in Tucker et al., “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation”; see McCarty, Polarization, for an overview on polarization.

^7. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism are some of the classical studies on the “extremist personality.” More recent studies look at the relationship between uncertainty and extremism, for instance: Hogg and Danielle, Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty. See also the recent scholarship of Kruglanski, Kopetz, and Szumowska, The Psychology of Extremism.

^8. See Backes, Political Extremes, 181–84; McLaughlin, Radicalism; Lucardie, Democratic Extremism; Berger, Extremism, 44; Cassam, Extremism.

^9. Cf. the bibliography in Smith and Holmwood, “Sociologies of Moderation,” 8; and the essays in this Special Issue. See also Bobbio, Left and Right, chap. 2; Clor, On Moderation; and the essays inspired by Aurelian Craiutu’s scholarship: Haan and Lok, Politics of Moderation in Modern European History.

^10. Craiutu, Faces of Moderation; Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds. See also Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege.

^11. Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, 230.

^12. Ibid., 18–23; and Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, 13–15.

^13. I use the term “radicalism” instead of “extremism” because radicalism is more neutral. “Extremism” is generally used in more quantitative, empirical, and case-studies- oriented fields. It is more frequently used to plot degrees of “extremism” on an axis from “more” to “less” extreme positions. “Radicalism,” in contrast, is used in more theoretical approaches such as historical approaches attempting to pinpoint the continuity of “radical” thoughts, strands, or movements. See Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre.”

^14. For more on this conception of literary genres and the influence of David Herman’s theory of narratology, see Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre.” This approach also owes much to the New Rhetoric (see note 16) and Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory.

^15. This observation is similar to Laclau’s argument that populism cannot be defined through a specifiable content: cf. chap. 1 of Laclau, On Populist Reason.

^16. The ideas of “break,” “attachment,” and of the creation of two sides with terms with a “common parity” were thoroughly explored by some of the proponents of the “New Rhetoric.” See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 411–59. Another important source is Kenneth Burke’s idea of “consubstantiality” in A Rhetoric of Motives, 20–23.

^17. As Freeden puts it, we cannot do away with ideologies as they are maps that help us decode social events and classify political facts. Freeden, Ideology, 2–3. See also Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theories. On the relation between ideology and rhetoric, see Finlayson, “Ideology and Political Rhetoric,” 197–213. Billig in Ideology and Social Psychology, 203–34, addresses the relation between extremism, moderation, and ideologies.

^18. Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre,” 36–43. Several scholars— including M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hassan, John Swale, and Carolyn Miller—shifted the use of genre outside of its strict literary context. They saw genre, not just in terms of the expectations readers develop when they read specific classes of text but in terms of stereotypical social situations with built-in potential responses that are expected by its participants. Ideologies operate in a similar way in that they offer cues to their publics which help them form different kinds of expectations.

^19. For more on this subject, see note 16.

^20. I rely on the translations in Tudor and Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy. One of the most comprehensive bibliographical and intellectual accounts of Bernstein’s life in English is in Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism. But see also Rogers, Before the Revisionist Controversy.

^21. McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 23; and Schorske, German Social Democracy, 2–3.

^22. McLellan, Karl Marx, 395–400.

^23. McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 23–24; and Schorske, German Social Democracy, 3–4.

^24. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 19–84; and Henry Tudor, introduction to Marxism and Social Democracy, 1–37.

^25. He was Engel’s executor together with Bebel. Tudor, “Principal Events in Bernstein’s Life,” introduction to Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, xxxvii.

^26. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 7–16.

^27. There is no clear date when the controversy began. It could have been in 1895 with Bernstein’s article on the 1849 revolution in France, according to McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 24, or with some un-socialist remarks he made in 1896 on colonial policy in “German Social Democracy and the Turkish Troubles,” 53.

^28. Die voraussetzungen des Sozialismus Und Die Aufgaben Der Sozialdemokratie is often translated as The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy. There was an English translation in 1909 under the title Evolutionary Socialism but, as Henry Tudor notes, substantial parts of the work were not translated. Tudor, introduction to Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, xi.

^29. Scott, “Introduction to Reform or Revolution,” 37–40.

^30. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 23–24; Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 255.

^31. On this, see Schorske in German Social Democracy.

^32. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, 104–5, 109–10; Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 145 note 8, and 146 note 11; McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 38.

^33. Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre.”

^34. Bernstein, “General Observations,” 76–77.

^35. Ibid., 76.

^36. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 35.

^37. Bernstein, “The Realistic and the Ideological,” 241.

^38. Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre.”

^39. Bernstein, “Struggle of Social Democracy,” 159–60.

^40. Bernstein, “Theory of Collapse,” 162–63 and 164.

^41. Ibid., 164–66.

^42. Ibid., 167.

^43. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 2–3.

^44. Bernstein, “Theory of Collapse,” 168–69.

^45. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 189–210.

^46. Bernstein had a long-standing interest in the study of radicalism, as attested by his study of seventeenth-century radicalism in England, Cromwell and Communism. See also chaps. 3 and 4 of Ostrowski, Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present.

^47. For instance, on the question of whether Bernstein was drastically departing from the orthodoxy of the SPD, see some of the statements at the Stuttgart Conference of 1898 in Tudor and Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy, 277, 291–92, 297, and 298; see also 19–20; Ostrowski, Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present, 10–11; Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism, 83–85 and 89–119. For the relation between Bernstein’s revisionism and the other factions within the SPD, see Fletcher, Revisionism and Empire, 125–40.

^48. For a comparison between Kautsky’s centrism and Bernstein’s revisionism, see Fletcher, Revisionism and Empire, 16–17. See also Schorske, German Social Democracy, 111–15 and 191–96.

^49. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 17.

^50. On intraparty conflicts within the SPD, see note 46. See also Ostrowski, Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present, 207–22.

^51. Moreira, “Political Radicalism as a Genre,” 70–76.

^52. Ebenstein, Chicagonomics. 184-193.

^53. See, for instance, Oakeshott, Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, 107–8: Though Oakeshott was very much in favor of the politics of skepticism and distrustful of the utopianism and blueprints of the politics of faith, he also says that “[w]ithout the pull exerted by faith, without the ‘perfectionism’ which we have seen to be both an illusion and a dangerous illusion … government in the sceptical style is liable to be overtaken by a nemesis of political quietism.” This is very similar to Aron’s remarks in “Machiavelli and Marx” when he says that, even though he prefers the pragmatic Machiavelli over the eschatological Marx, it is best to “not pick one of the two and simply let them pursue, within and outside of ourselves, an endless and open-ended dialogue.” Aron, “Machiavel et Marx,” 108.

^54. See Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, 230–33.

^55. Bernstein, “General Observations,” 73–81; and Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 18.

^56. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 140–41.

^57. Bobbio, Old Age and Other Essays, 68.

^58. Bobbio, Left and Right, 23.

^59. Ibid., 22.

^60. Bobbio uses “extremism” as the opposite of “moderation” in a positive sense—that we will define below. “Radicalism,” however, is positive for Bobbio and he opposes it to “moderation” in a negative sense. Bobbio, Left and Right, 93.

^61. Ibid., 25.

^62. Ibid.

^63. Bobbio, Old Age and Other Essays, 68.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro Góis Moreira

Pedro Góis Moreira, Ph.D., teaches at the Department of Political Science of Texas Christian University at Dallas, USA. His main research interest includes the relation between ideologies, radicalism, and moderation. His most recent publications include his edited volume Revisiting Richard Rorty (Vernon Press, 2020), and “Laclau’s New Postmodern Radicalism: Politics, Democracy, and the Epistemology of Certainty” (Critical Review, 2022).