Cultural Writing. Political Science. The purpose of this book is to address a recent claim that socialist theory can be renewed on the basis of 'classical Marxism', the socialist politics of the Second International in the period between the death of Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution of 1917. This claim is approached, with both sympathy and some distance, through a series of biographical chapters that address the lives and arguments of important figures within the movement: Paul Lafargue, Tom Maguire, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and V.I. Lenin.