Rudolf Schlesinger - Central European Democracy and its Background: Economic and Political Group Organizations

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The International Library of Sociology

CENTRAL EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS BACKGROUND

The International Library of Sociology

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
In 18 Volumes

I	The American Science of Politics	Crick
II	The Analysis of Political Behaviour	Lasswell
III	The Analysis of Political Systems	Verney
IV	Central European Democracy and its Background	Schlesinger
V	The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology	Hallowell
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
VI	Democracy and Dictatorship	Barbu
VII	Dictatorship and Political Police	Bramstedt
VIII	Federalism in Central and Eastern Europe	Schlesinger
IX	History of Socialism	Laidler
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
X	How People Vote	Benney et al
XI	The Logic of Liberty	Polanyi
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
XII	Pacifism	Martin
XIII	Patterns of Peacemaking	Thomson et al
XIV	Plan for Reconstruction	Hutt
XV	Politics of Influence	Wootton
XVI	Politics of Mass Society	Kornhauser
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
XVII	Power and Society	Lasswell and Kaplan
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
XVIII	Process of Independence	Mansur

CENTRAL EUROPEAN
DEMOCRACY AND ITS
BACKGROUND

Economic and Political
Group Organization

by

RUDOLFSCHLESINGER

First published in 1953
by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 1999, 2000
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1953 Rudolf Schlesinger

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Central European Democracy and its Background
ISBN 0-415-17539-9
Political Sociology: 18 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17820-7
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

CONTENTS

PART THREECENTRAL EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS FALL
(19241938)

PREFACE

T HIS book is concerned with a particular type of social organization and a particular stage in the development of certain countries. Some, among my readers, may reproach me for describing phenomena which they regard as characteristic only of a few individual countries in terms of a general trend of modern society. My only answer must be to endeavour to carry out my task in such a way as to make it clear that the problems discussed are not of merely historical interest, and may yet have their relevance even for Britain. All nations at a certain stage of their development have to face certain general problems, though these problems take on very different shapes in different national settings.

The regional framework of the investigation has its own importance. It was chosen not only because of my conviction that contributions to political science are most useful if the authors have had some experience of the political life of the countries they write about, but also because the matters investigated mark an important stage in the development of the modern labour movement. As I have explained elsewhere, I consider the application of Marxism by the Central European Social Democrat parties as a distortion of its original meaning. We cannot, however, neglect the fact that it was in this application or distortion, that Marxism displayed the more popular aspects of its impact during the period of the Second International; even Russian Bolshevism grew up as a direct reaction against this kind of Marxism.

The institutional forms of the experience here discussed should not be thought of as mere reflexions of a local failure to apply Western democratic concepts, not to speak of the nave belief that that failure resulted from mere misunderstandings. Local conditions, which made it inevitable, were reflected in the institutions ; but those institutions were shaped by a basic trend found in all countriesat least all those within the Western political traditionwhose economic system is based upon private ownership of the means of production. Experience shows that in all these countries, though with differing rates of speed, mass parties based upon the organization of sectional groups are replacing parties which grew out of the social conflicts in which the system was formed or out of oligarchic cliques which survived from still earlier periods. The result is that the place of most citizens in political life is defined a priori by their economic status, and what real democracy exists must be democracy within the socio-political group. In analyzing the experience of Central Europe we are analysing an extreme and locally coloured instance of a trend generally observable.

This book has grown out of diverse lines of study, pursued at different periods of my life, and the reader must judge for himself whether I have succeeded in bringing them together. Thirty years ago, at the suggestion of my teacher, Prof. Grnberg, I wrote my thesis on the relationship between political Socialism and Trade Unionism in Germany and Austria ; from that time on I have never ceased to be interested in the history of the Central European labour movement, in whose activities I took part right up to, and after, the Hitlerite conquest. I have never believed in the primitive explanation of the Social Democratic policies, after the vote for the War Credits in 1914, as a betrayal of Marxist principles by a mere degenerate clique of bureaucrats ; I was interested in the kind of Marxism which could be produced by such a movement as pre-1914 Social Democracy, and in the reasons for which such a party continued to oppose the Revisionism of Bernstein, who correctly foretold its course. In my thesis of 1922 I submitted that orthodox Social Democracy merely expressed the need for an all-embracing organization of labour as against the trends which would restrict trade unionism to a narrow aristocracy of workers ; in my book on

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