The word “revisionism” carries approximately the
same universal recognition and indefinite meaning as
heresy did in the late Middle Ages. It needs both a
heretic, an excommunicator, a body of ideas whose
interpretation is at issue, and a community of believers
exclusion from which is the penultimate, if not final,
sanction. It is therefore a sociological or political as
much as an intellectual or doctrinal phenomenon.
Hence no final objective definition of revisionism is
really possible; it depends on historical circumstances
as well as the body of ideas or beliefs at issue. In the
present context the meaning of revisionism is best
illustrated by examining the problem separately in its
historical context, its intellectual structure, and finally
in its current form of universalization. The origin of
the particular word revisionism is historically linked
with German Social Democracy before 1914 and this
is where any discussion must start.
