Like modern social democrats, Bernstein's politics are reformist, not revolutionary. He blames Marx's Hegelianism for misleading him (Marx) into advocating revolutionary politics. Bernstein rejected Marx's analysis that concludes that crises can not be avoided in capitalism, and that the contrast between the rich few and the working many will become more obvious. Instead of economic analysis, Bernstein argues that socialism must be based on the idealistic ethics of neo-Kantians like F. A. Lang.

Kant (1724 - 1804) believed that all rational beings are subject to ethical laws not derived from experience or society. He gives various forms for these ethical laws, but the following summarizes them: treat everyone as an end in him or her self, never as a means only. This means that it is never right to exploit anyone. From this principle and a Marxist analysis of capitalism (which Kant would not have accepted) it follows that capitalism ought to be abolished because it is inherently exploitative.

F. A. Lange was a member of the neo-Kantian movement in German philosophy in the mid- to-late 19th century. The following sketch is translated from a German textbook from 1932:

"With his History of Materialism, Friedrich Albert Lange (1828 - 75) gave the neo-Kantian movement wide distribution. He saw in the Critical Philosophy [i. e., Kant's philosophy] the conclusive refutation of materialism as a world view. Knowing is conditioned by psychological organization. The world is only representation, our representation. Consequently, matter is only representation, a product of my organization as experience. Hence we know only the world of appearances. The world of things in themselves, the absolute essence of things, is wrapped in an impenetrable darkness. Because our actuality is not absolute but only appearance, the idealistic pursuit of the human spirit obtains new power. Man needs a completion of actuality through a world of ideas, created by him. Metaphysics is justified as poetry of concepts, not as provable knowledge. We have the highest elevation above actuality in the philosophical poetry of Schiller, which bestows overwhelming power on the ideal, by transferring it to the territory of fantasy."

Max Apel, Einführung in die Philosophie, Verlag von Philipp Reclam, Leipzig, 1932, pp. 219-220.