A Socialist Third Way? Rudolf Hilferding’s Evolutionary Socialism as Syncopated Note to Early Neoliberalism

Higgins exposes a little-known contribution of Hilferding to the development of twentieth-century political economy: how he served as an explicit foil to the coordinators of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, the birthplace of neoliberalism. Hilferding’s sophisticated theories of moderate, evolutionary socialism produced a syncopated note to the advent of the dominant Western ideology in the twentieth century by helping to set its stage, particularly in the German milieu. This chapter not only significantly serves to restore some of the lustre of the work of a misunderstood and underappreciated thinker, but is also timely as the West is currently involved in a process of ideological reconstruction and critique of finance capitalism, to which a revival of Hilferding’s moderate, but revolutionary democratic socialism still has much to say.