In view of the interest which the Spanish Civil War continues to arouse, it is surprising that the Spanish Socialist Party, so closely linked with the life and death of the Second Republic, has received only a minimum of scholarly attention. Relatively little has been written about the origins and complexities of the party’s internal struggles or about the roles played by ideology and personalismo. The present volume deals with the career of one of the most prominent Spanish socialist leaders in the years 1912-1940. It is not the awaited scholarly biography, but it does supply needed information on one of the three factions which divided the Socialist Party in the early thirties.

The author was the friend and political disciple of Julián Besteiro who succeeded Pablo Iglesias as president of the party in 1925. His book is essentially an apologia for the most conservative wing of the Spanish socialist movement—headed by Besteiro—which viewed itself as the true guardian of the Iglesias tradition. Heavily loaded with lengthy excerpts from Besteiro’s speeches, it is by no means a biography but rather a combination memoir and source book.

One must accept the author’s contention that in ideological terms Besteiro was the legitimate heir of Pablo Iglesias. His public utterances reveal that throughout his career this Madrid University professor merely gave more polished expression to the social democratic orthodoxy which the founder had originally distilled for Spanish purposes from the writings of Jules Guesde and Karl Kautsky. There was much ideological intransigence in this, along with a perhaps obsessive concern for the purity of the creed. Endless homage was paid to the class war and to an always distant “revolutionary” transformation. But the essence of Pablismo, as Besteiro espoused it, was a basic commitment to democratic values and reformist gradualism. At most it was (as Halévy said about the ideology of the German SPD) a doctrine not of revolutionary action but of revolutionary expectation.

Despite the author’s insistence that Besteiro remained always a revolutionary socialist, the latter’s words and deeds reveal him rather as a decent and correct Menshevik—the Martov, perhaps, of the Spanish Revolution—too intellectual and doctrinaire and probably too noble in character to have retained an instinct for power and revolutionary action. Thus against the late-blooming radicalism of Largo Caballero and the pragmatism of Indalecio Prieto, Besteiro and his followers responded to the crisis years of the early thirties with passivity. They did not much welcome the fall of the monarchy; they balked at the general strike of December 1930; they opposed Socialist ministerial participation in the Republic, since they feared contamination by the bourgeois parties; and they were utterly opposed to the uprising of 1934.

It remained for the ideologically indigent Largo Caballero to meet the threat to Socialist strength posed by the gathering force of anarcho-syndicalism after 1930. Not wishing to see the Socialists again reduced to a mere sect, he broke with a half-century of reformism and led the party and trade unions down the path of revolutionary voluntarism. He thereby left Besteiro and his supporters increasingly isolated and impotent. The present volume inadvertently helps to make clear the sources of this impotence in that it reveals a cautious, democratic temper coupled with a deterministic—almost fatalistic—socialist orthodoxy which seems to assume that the revolution will be a product of the logic of history.

Each of these tendencies reinforced the other to produce a curious passivity in a time of revolutionary turmoil. Thus these disciples of Pablo Iglesias viewed with considerable ambivalence the ferment and upheaval of the Republican period. They were the doctrinaires of Spanish Socialism and the history of the Second Republic largely passed them by.