Otto Bauer and the Philosophy of Praxis – Then and Now

Abstract

Otto Bauer (1881–1938) has emerged once more in the thought of Western Marxists. The dominant theoretical voice of the Austrian Social Democrats in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the First Austrian Republic, Bauer was re-examined in the 1970s and ’80s as ‘the third way’ was being explored in European politics by Eurocommunists. Bauer again is being discussed in the twenty-first century as not only a European ‘third way’, but as a model for nations across the globe. Bauer’s vision theoretically as well as tactically between 1919 and 1934, when Austrian fascism ended the political efforts of Austrian Social Democracy, was of a pluralist parliamentary governance that sought through party coalitions and the influence of social experiment a developing societal praxis whose socialist principles would realise eventually Marx’s understanding of a classless society. A gradualism in long-range strategy and tactics would lead democratically to greater collective coexistence embracing differing cultures within and beyond separate nations. Reviewed here are five publications between 2005 and 2011 which are either thoughtfully supportive or critically dismissive of Bauer’s multi-cultural models for the socialist coexistence of communities and nations. Two conference collections and three books on Bauer’s thought and political life enable the contemporary mind to evaluate the seminal promise of Bauer’s Marxist understanding, where for him Marxism was a social-scientific instrument to guide societal development.