**Forerunners of Modern Socialism** (German: *Die Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus*) is a four volume work that documents the history of primitive communist and socialist ideas, edited by Karl Kautsky and including contributions by a number of prominent intellectuals of the Second International, including Eduard Bernstein, Paul Lafargue, C. Hugo, Franz Mehring, and Georgii Plekhanov. The first volume was published in 1895. Although only partially translated into English as of the middle of the 2010s, this German-language work is regarded as an important pioneering Marxist study of the history of the impact of early Christianity and various classical philosophical thinkers upon the modern socialist movement. ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forerunners_of_Modern_Socialism))