Thorstein Veblen
Review author to: 'Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert'. By 
WERNER SOMBART. With a chronological table of the social movement from 1750 
to 1896. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1896. 8vo, pp. 143.
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 3. (Jun., 1897), p. 391-392.
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In the course of eight lectures Professor Sombart gives a survey and 
characterization of the socialist movement and the theories of the 
socialism from the point of view of an economist who stands outside 
the movement and still is not out of sympathy with it. The motive 
force of the movement is found (pp. 7-12) to be the sense of injury 
and of the precariousness of existence which pervades the 
proletariat of today, pushed to active measures by a propensity for 
revolutionary disturbance. This revolutionary propensity is of the 
nature of a nervous affection and comes of the excessive rush and 
strain of modern life. That this restless impulse to agitation and 
revolution has definitively taken the specific direction of the 
Marxian social democracy is due to the temperament of the German 
population and the work of Karl Marx (p. 62). There is a large 
personal element of leadership in socialism. The work of Marx which 
has so profoundly affected the character of the latter-day social 
movement consists substantially in an unfaltering realism applied to 
social and economic speculation. This [392] realism, the so-called 
materialistic conception, is a characteristically modern fact, and 
its acceptance by the modern socialists distinguishes them from all 
communistic or other radical diversions in the past. The attitude 
which this point of view should give is that of a passionless, un-
eager, unwavering furtherance of the industrial development; for 
according to this materialistic conception the democratic 
collectivism is to come in as the due culmination and consequence of 
industrial evolution. Such, says Professor Sombart, is the attitude 
of Marx at his best, and such he finds also to be the attitude of 
the Marxism socialists in a greater degree and more consistently as 
time goes on. All this disillusionment and work-day apprehension of 
social development as an inevitable process does not hinder the 
socialists from holding to their ideal with fervor, nor does it 
hinder them from doing their best to hasten and aggravate the class-
struggle through the means of which the industrial development at 
its culmination is to pass into the democratic collectivism. The 
logical and the only promising line of action for the socialists, 
according to Professor Sombart (pp. 110-118), is to strengthen and 
accelerate the growth and spread of the modern culture, and carry it 
to the highest pitch attainable. Oddly enough - though perhaps it 
seems less odd to an affectionate latter-day citizen of the militant 
Fatherland - this ideal cultural growth to which socialism should 
look, it is explicitly held, comprises a large unfolding of warlike 
activity. Socialism is, on this and related grounds, not apprehended 
to be, in strict consistency, an international (à fortiori not an 
anti-national) movement. It is a further curious feature of 
Professor Sombart's exposition of socialism that he finds no logical 
ground for an atheistic or undevout attitude in the accepted realism 
of Marx and his followers. This is perhaps as characteristically 
new-German a misapprehension of Marxism as the contrary 
misapprehension which makes Marxism "materialistic" in the 
metaphysical sense is characteristic of the traditional view among 
English-speaking critics.
V.