Robert Michels Socialism And Modernity

Robert Michels (1876-1936) is best known for his 1911 book Political Parties, which is still a standard reference in political science debates. Michels' work sought to prove an "iron law of oligarchy" that governs the organisational evolution of democratic political parties. The work was closely informed by Michels' engagement with the German Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s, his involvement in radical politics in France and Italy in this period, and by his interest in a range of intellectual and social movements - including feminism, nationalism, racial theory, and the emerging disciplines of sociology and political science. Using archival and printed sources hitherto overlooked in work on Michels, this new study contests previous arguments which have sought to explain Michels as a disillusioned adherent of ideas of direct democracy or as an extremist moving from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism. The biographical and intellectual influences on Michels are shown to be more complex, and more transnational, than such schematic explanations have allowed. Andrew Bonnell sheds new light on Michels' relationship with the German Social Democratic Party and on his understanding of his own role as an intellectual in a workers' party. Bonnell also analyses Michels' problematical relationship with revolutionary syndicalism in France and Italy. Michels was connected to a possibly uniquely diverse network of intellectual and political contacts in pre-1914 Europe. This transnational intellectual history illuminates the intellectual worlds in which Michels moved and presents a new interpretation of his shift from the radical left of the spectrum to Italian fascism, an intellectual itinerary which has intrigued many historians.

Robert Michels (1876-1936) is best known for his 1911 book Political Parties, which is still a standard reference in political science debates. Michels' work sought to prove an "iron law of oligarchy" that governs the organisational evolution of democratic political parties. The work was closely informed by Michels' engagement with the German Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s, his involvement in radical politics in France and Italy in this period, and by his interest in a range of intellectual and social movements - including feminism, nationalism, racial theory, and the emerging disciplines of sociology and political science. Using archival and printed sources hitherto overlooked in work on Michels, this new study contests previous arguments which have sought to explain Michels as a disillusioned adherent of ideas of direct democracy or as an extremist moving from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism. The biographical and intellectual influences on Michels are shown to be more complex, and more transnational, than such schematic explanations have allowed. Andrew Bonnell sheds new light on Michels' relationship with the German Social Democratic Party and on his understanding of his own role as an intellectual in a workers' party. Bonnell also analyses Michels' problematical relationship with revolutionary syndicalism in France and Italy. Michels was connected to a possibly uniquely diverse network of intellectual and political contacts in pre-1914 Europe. This transnational intellectual history illuminates the intellectual worlds in which Michels moved and presents a new interpretation of his shift from the radical left of the spectrum to Italian fascism, an intellectual itinerary which has intrigued many historians.

The principle of self-government through political parties, the cornerstone of democracy, has come to be regarded as a solution to the problem of nationality. This is because the principle of nationality entails the acceptance of the idea of popular government. The importance of the principle of nationality is undeniable, and most of the national questions of Western Europe might be solved in accordance with this principle. Matters are complicated by geographical and strategical considerations, such as the difficulty of determining natural frontiers and the frequent need to establish strategic frontiers. Moreover, the principle of nationality cannot help us where nationalities barely exist or where they are entangled in inextricable confusion. The present work is a critical discussion of the problem of democracy. Michels believes that democracy, as an intellectual theory and as a practical movement, has entered upon a critical phase from which exit will be extremely difficult. In this book he analyzes the tendencies that oppose the realization of democracy, and claims that these tendencies can be classified in three ways: dependence upon the nature of the individual; dependence upon the nature of the political structure; and dependence upon the nature of organization. This edition, described by Morris Janowitz as a "classic of modern social science" and by Melvin Tumin as "the beginning of a tradition," offers a landmark study in political science. Following its original publication in 1910, the study and analysis of political parties was established as a new branch of science. Political Parties continues to be a foundation work in the literature and is a necessary addition to the libraries of contemporary political scientists, sociologists, and historians.

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity? The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological. Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.

The relationships, past and present, between Jews and the political left remain of abiding interest to both the academic community and the public. Jews and Leftist Politics contains new and insightful chapters from world-renowned scholars and considers such matters as the political implications of Judaism; the relationships of leftists and Jews; the histories of Jews on the left in Europe, the United States, and Israel; contemporary anti-Zionism; the associations between specific Jews and Communist parties; and the importance of gendered perspectives. It also contains fresh studies of canonical figures, including Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, and Martin Buber, and examines the affiliations of Jews to prominent institutions, calling into question previous widely held assumptions. The volume is characterized by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities, and sheds considerable light on contentious themes.

Red Secularism is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent. Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Provides a new way of thinking about parties formed by social movements, and their evolution over time.