Social Democracy before the soziale Rechtsstaat. From the “National Community of Culture” to the “Social Homogeneity” in Hermann Heller’s Work

Abstract

Given the currently importance of the question of social democracy, this paper aims to investigate into it through Hermann Heller’s work. Our proposal is to scrutinize his social-democratic ideas that are prior to the coining of his well-known concept of sozialer Rechtsstaat. To this end we pay attention to the notion of “national community of culture”, developed in his book Socialism and Nation, originally published in 1925, as such as to the notion of “social homogeneity”, with which Heller dealed in his 1928 article “Political Democracy and Social Homogeneity”. The main contributions of this paper consist of a clarification of his social democratic ideas, as well as a recognition of two moments in his intellectual biography: an early national-cultural one and a later democratic-pluralist one.