a leader of the revisionist wing of the German Social Democratic Party and a minister in the early years of the Weimar Republic (1919–33).

As a young grammar school teacher, David founded (1893) the Socialist Mitteldeutsche Sonntagszeitung (“Mid-German Sunday News”); but his affiliation with the Social Democrats soon cost him his state employment. In a series of articles in August–September 1894 he criticized traditional Marxian theory as it applied to small farmers, thus somewhat anticipating the first works of his more famous revisionist colleague Eduard Bernstein. Elected to the German Reichstag (parliament) in 1903, David soon became a leading spokesman for parliamentary social democracy and subsequently played a crucial role in the formulation of his party's support of the imperial government during World War I. On the eve of the armistice he was appointed undersecretary of the foreign office (October 1918); and in the postwar Weimar Republic he served variously, during 1919 and 1920, as first president of the Weimar National Assembly, twice as minister without portfolio, and once as minister of the interior. Of David's considerable number of works on Socialism, his Sozialismus und Landwirtschaft (1903; “Socialism and Agriculture”) is considered the most important.