3 - Prometheans

Summary

This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.