Balanced biography of Kautsky.

[Popular Front of Judea]

In my previous trip through the Marxist left I did not pay much attention to Karl Kautsky, due in part to the standard Leninist denunciation of the 'renegade'. However I see the renewed interest here and elsewhere about Kautsky and his works. I frankly do not know much about his life or his politics. Is there a balanced, nuanced biography about him out there?

[Fred]

In my previous trip through the Marxist left I did not pay much attention to Karl Kautsky, due in part to the standard Leninist denunciation of the 'renegade'. However I see the renewed interest here and elsewhere about Kautsky and his works. I frankly do not know much about his life or his politics. Is there a balanced, nuanced biography about him out there?

I don't know of one, comrade. The folks that seem most interested in Comrade Karl have, I believe, a particular political agenda to exhume his justifiably tarnished corpse, in arriving at some kind of "new" left talking/reformist synthesis (i.e. centrism). Lars Lih's book has lots of information but he is, in my own mind, far too positively inclined toward Kautsky and emphasizes the written over the deed.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Gary Steenson and Massimo Salvadori both have written a biography of Kautky.
If I remember correctly the both are a bit more to the contemporary social-democratic side of things.

[The Idler]

I can see Weekly Worker writing one sometime in the future.

[Noa Rodman]

His own take (it's in German, but google-translate makes it readable):

http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1924/xx/werden.htm

The Paris commune made him interested in socialism.