Conrad Schmidt

Conrad Schmidt (25 November 1863 – 14 October 1932) was a German economist, philosopher, and journalist of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Biography

Conrad Schmidt was born into a family active in the SPD. He was the older brother of the painter Käthe Kollwitz. In the mid-1880s, he studied in Berlin and in 1887 he defended his doctoral dissertation in Leipzig on "Natural Wages", in which he compared the theories of wages and exploitation of Johann Karl Rodbertus and Karl Marx. Schmidt dismissed Marx's theory as an unproven hypothesis in favor of Rodbertus' theory, which was based on the recognition of natural rights. However, after a closer examination of Marx's writings, Schmidt revised his sentence and became an adherent of Marxism.

In 1890, on the advice of Engels, Schmidt accepted a position as editor of the Swiss newspaper Züricher Post. Schmidt turned on what he perceived to be economic determinism in Engels' position and switched to neo-Kantian positions. He emphasized the ethical aspects of the labor movement such as sacrifice, consciousness and party loyalty. According to Schmidt, these qualities arise from the primary animal superegoistic instincts that are formed in every living being in the course of evolution to preserve the species and become more conscious and rational in humans in order to be realized in the working class. The philosophical works of Schmidt, in which he proposed to combine Marxism with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, served as an ideological source of Marxist revisionism espoused by Eduard Bernstein. Schmidt and his wife Anna were buried in the artists' department of Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery. His sister Käthe Kollwitz created the tombstone.