this Nihilism is not confined to those who would destroy Marxism root and branch. A leaning towards Nihilism is discoverable also in most of those critics of Marxism who go no further than revision, as is well exemplified in their leader Eduard Bernstein, who attempted to prove the impossibility of scientific socialism, in a lecture delivered before a body of students at Berlin.
Of course, this Nihilism is not equally pronounced in all of Marx's critics. But it is to be found as a more or less conscious substratum of their criticism in all except those who confine their criticism to some one phase or branch of the Marxian system. These later critics, not dealing with the system as a whole, naturally do not feel the void created by the supposed demolition of the Marxian theory, and can therefore run their course merrily without feeling constrained to either fill the void or account for its existence.
Those however who viewed and reviewed the system as a whole could not but feel the aching void which would be left if the Marxian system were demolished; they naturally looked for another system to be reared in its place, and, that task proving beyond their powers, they fell into Nihilism. Thus the question whether Marxism is or is not science turned into the question whether there is, or could be, any social science. How keenly this was felt by some of the critics of Marxism can be judged from the following statement of Dr. Paul Weisengruen, one of the ablest critics of Marxism and one of those who believe that the whole Marxian system must be abandoned as being radically and basically false. He says, alluding to the so-called "crisis" in Marxism, by which term the Revisionist movement is sometimes designated—"The crisis in Marxism means a crisis in the whole range of social science."
All this makes it absolutely imperative to re-state the Marxian theory, in the light of this new criticism, examining the objections raised with a view of determining whether and how far this criticism has led, or must needs lead, to a revision, modification, or abandonment, of any
