Ich bin gerade über ein Protokoll eines Symposiums unter dem Titel “SOCIALISM: What Happened? What Now?” gestolpert. Von Jeane Kirkpatrick finden sich dort diese autobiographischen Absätze:

I’d like to tell you bit more about my own career as a socialist.[...]
After that, I moved on to New York, where I studied socialism in a different fashion. My principal advisor and professor at Columbia was Franz Neumann, who was a brilliant professor and writer, and who had been himself a member not only of the German Social Democratic Party but a member of the ISPD, Independent Social Democratic Party, which was the left social democratic party. He had been active in the politics of Weimar as long as he thought he could still escape Germany and survive. He had thought very deeply about it. He taught and wrote about both the Second Empire, about the Weimar Republic, and about the German socialist movement.

We studied all manner of socialists, including those mentioned here. We studied not only Marx and Engles but also Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg and a whole array. Edward Bernstein I found particularly interesting. I was already a revisionist at that early stage. I was especially fascinated by their doctrines of war and of peace. [...]

As I read the utopian socialists, the scientific socialists, the German Social Democrats and revolutionary socialists— whatever I could in either English or French— I came to the conclusion that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort. So I turned my attention more and more to political philosophy and less and less to socialist activism of any kind. [...]

It’s useful to distinguish between radical socialism and social democracy. The differences between them have been absolutely critical. It’s important to distinguish between the Weimar Republic, which was not a perfect republic but had many good qualities, and the Soviet Union, which was clearly not a good republic.

But I always remained very interested in the people who could not be satisfied by developing something clearly do-able, and who sought instead to transform human nature.