Socialism from below

by Hal Draper

"These essays by Hal Draper reflect his standing as a scholar, political journalist, and polemicist. The collection concentrates on what is of the greatest contemporary interest--his understanding of the meaning of socialism. In Draper's view, the divisions running through the history of the socialist movement between reformists and revolutionaries, authoritarians and democrats, were secondary; the important distinction was between those socialists who looked for some outside authority that would hand down salvation to the masses from above and those who saw the key to the reform of existing society in the struggle for self-emancipation from below." "The first part contains Draper's pamphlet, The Two Souls of Socialism, for over twenty years the most widely read and succinct statement of Draper's radically different view of contemporary politics, and also several historical studies showing how Marx was the only major nineteenth-century thinker to defend unequivocally the democratic mov