Eduard Bernstein (born Jan. 6, 1850, Berlin—died Dec. 18, 1932, Berlin) was a Social Democratic propagandist, political theorist, and historian, one of the first Socialists to attempt a revision of Karl Marx’s tenets, such as abandoning the ideas of the imminent collapse of the capitalist economy and the seizure of power by the proletariat. Although he was not a distinguished theoretician, Bernstein, called “the father of revisionism,” envisaged a type of social democracy that combined private initiative with social reform.