Forerunners of Modern Socialism

Forerunners of Modern Socialism (German: Die Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus) is a four volume work that documents the history of primitive communist and socialist ideas, edited by Karl Kautsky and including contributions by a number of prominent intellectuals of the Second International, including Eduard Bernstein, Paul Lafargue, C. Hugo, Franz Mehring, and Georgii Plekhanov.

Although only partially translated into English as of the middle of the 2010s, this German-language work is regarded as an important pioneering Marxist study of the history of the impact of early Christianity and various classical philosophical thinkers upon the modern socialist movement.

[1] The first volume of what was to eventually emerge as a four volume work was published in Stuttgart by the Dietz publishing house and included topical contributions by Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Paul Lafargue, C. Hugo, Franz Mehring, and Georgii Plekhanov.

[3] It was a major work of Second International, Orthodox Marxism in analyzing history from ancient times to the early modern period.

Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International began his coverage of Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures inaugurating the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both of them "follow the long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Catiline, Christ..."[4] The final volume of the four-volume set was written by Hugo Lindemann and Morris Hillquit, focusing on socialism in France and America.