The case against historical necessity in English and German socialism: Eduard Bernstein, Hubert Bland and the social-democratic turn in the late nineteenth century

Building on Eduard Bernstein’s encounter with Fabian socialists when he lived in London, this paper seeks to draw a parallel between his call for efficient wide-ranging reformism and the plea of Hubert Bland, one of the contributors to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), for a workers’ party. Both Bland, who criticized the optimism of his fellow-Fabians underlying the strategy of permeation, and Bernstein, who opposed the Social-Democratic Party’s revolutionary rhetoric, repudiated historic necessity as a founding principle for socialism. Through different approaches, this common stance paves the way for a social-democratic movement aiming to combine reformist efficiency with freedom.