 Moreover, Cohen argued that, as states amend their laws to better approximate ideal laws, legal frameworks should emerge to govern the economic activity of democratically-constituted pluralities of people. In other words, he thought that an ideal state would allow democratic workers’ collectives to own the means of production. In his Ethics of Pure Will as well as his 1896 “Postscript” to F.A. Lange’s History of Materialism, Cohen argues that this socialism follows straightforwardly from a proper understanding of Kant’s categorical imperative (Cohen 1902, 320). For Cohen, not treating people merely as a means entails not exploiting their labor (Holzhey 2005, 26). Along with Lange, Cohen thus advocated a socialism with Kantian and liberal foundations, rather than Marxist ones. (The 1890 repeal of Bismark’s Anti-Socialist Laws would have offered him some evidence that Germany was moving towards that democratic socialist ideal.) Cohen’s Kantian socialism was an important influence on socialist political leaders such as Eduard Bernstein, a social democratic member of the Reichstag (Gay 1970).