bate on emotional socialism, they can also beread asarecommendation specif-
icallytowomen to holdback and practice restraint.Accordingly,Engels’sadvice
to Miss Harkness,“the more the opinions of theauthorremains hidden, the bet-
ter for the work of art,”¹³drawsonthe familiar idealist aesthetic argument in
favorofdisinterested pleasure. And his instruction toKautsky that she“does
not have to servetothe reader onaplatter the future historicalresolution of
the social conflicts he [i.e., the novel’sauthor]describes”¹⁴hingesonarevealing
slippageinthe gendering ofauthorship thatassumesall authorstobemale yet
describes anyliteraryshortcomingsinhousewifelyterms.
Emboldened by growingmass support and eagerto solidify political alli-
ances,some Social Democrats around the turn of the century began tovoice
long-standingconcerns about the large role of emotions in proletarian identifica-
tions. The languageused to describethis“problem”invariablypresupposedafe-
male or feminizing subject position.Adjectivessuch as“soft”and“vague”were
frequentlyenlisted, with the words’implied sense of indeterminacyintended to
highlight the clarity and truth provided instead by scientific socialism. Eduard
Bernstein’sdescription of the“fuzzy emotional communism”prevalent among
the lower classes not onlyestablishedacleargendered hierarchybetween the
uneducated masses, the worker intelligentsia,and the labor aristocracy,but
also usedthe languageofemotions to separate the scientific claims of historical
materialism from the romantic utopianism of the earlysocialists.¹⁵Karl Kautsky
in fact coined the termGefühlssozialismusin orderto marginalize the irrational
tendencies still found in the effusive rhetoric ofKurt Eisner,the editor ofVor-
wärts,and to underscorethe need ofamoremature,restrained, and manlyap-
proachto socialism.¹⁶In his commentary on the Erfurt Program,Kautsky singled
out the workers’desire to desire –that is, theirdreams ofabetter life–for its
potentiallydestabilizing effects. In his view,their discovery of personal needs
and their expression of individual demands ahead of anyreal improvements
in the economic conditions were bound to createproblems for the socialist
Friedrich Engels,Letterto MinnaKautsky,26November 1885, http://www.marxists.org/ar
chive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_11_26.htm,1March2017.
Friedrich Engels,Letter to Margaret Harkness,c.1April 1888, http://www.marxists.org/ar
chive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm,1March2017.
EduardBernstein,Die Geschichte des Sozialismus in Einzeldarstellungen(Stuttgart: Dietz,
1895),39.
Karl Kautsky,“DieFortsetzung einer unmöglichen Diskussion. Gefühlssozialismus und wis-
senschaftlicher Sozialismus,”Die Neue Zeit2.23 (1905): 717 – 727. Foravery different view of the
roleofenthusiasm in the cultivation of class instinct,see Kurt Eisner,“Wenn undaber,”Vor-
wärts,9September 1905.
Emotional Socialism and Sentimental Masculinity 71