Eduard Bernstein (Berlin, 1850-1932), German politician, is the father of the revisionism of the Marxian doctrine and one of the founders of the Social Democracy.

Born into a Jewish family, he joined the Social Democratic Workers Party in 1872. Three years later he participates with Bebel and Liebknecht in the drafting of the Gotha Congress Program, in which his party, with a Marxist tendency, joins the Lassallean current to form the current Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1878, the year anti-socialist laws were enacted, he went into exile in Switzerland, where he became editor of Der Sozialdemokrat. However, a decade later, due to pressure from Bismarck, the Swiss government closed the publication, so the author settles in London, where he maintains a close relationship with Engels (of whom he will be the literary executor) and Kautsky . In 1891 he wrote the Erfurt Program with this and Bebel, and between 1896 and 1898 he published in Die Neue Zeit the series of articles "Problems of socialism", which would give rise to the revisionist debate within the party. His thesis, however, are rejected at the Stuttgart Congress (1898). A year later he publishes The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, which is followed by controversies with Kautsky, Luxemburg and others. In 1901 he returned to Germany, where he became editor of Vorwärts and held a seat in the Reichstag (1902-1906 and 1912-1918), although, due to his opposition to the war, he temporarily left the party, to which he returned to end of the contest. In 1920 he returns to the Reichstag, and the following year he succeeds in getting the party to approve at the Görlitz Congress a program influenced by his revisionist thesis. He will hold his seat until 1928, when he retires from politics. His main legacy is the conception of evolutionary socialism as the mature fruit of liberalism.