Page:Karl Kautsky - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat - tr. Henry James Stenning.djvu/15



Karl Kautsky, the author of "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," of which an English translation is now submitted to the public, is the most eminent Socialist writer of the Continent.

Kautsky is 65 years of age, was born in Austria, and has lived most of his life in Germany. He resided in London, in close association with Friedrich Engels, from 1885 to 1890, and studied daily at the British Museum.

For more than thirty years Kautsky has served International Socialism with high literary ability, great learning, and unusual aptitude for sociological research.

Students of economics owe him a heavy debt for the laborious and difficult work of editing the literary remains of Karl Marx. In 1882, Kautsky, in partnership with another, founded the Neue Zeit, from the editorship of which he was deposed by the German Majority Socialists in May, 1918. His various books have been translated into many European languages, and have been an important factor in the education of the European working classes. By way of recreation from his political and economic duties, Kautsky employed his scanty leisure in the study of Christian origins, and some ten years ago published "The Origin of Christianity," one of the most fascinating books on that subject ever written.