ABOUT THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This is a  blog about the  social sciences 

A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books ed Cecile Vidal et al (2023)

The purpose driving this work is to reread 101 books, published since the Second World War, that have left their mark on how the social sciences have been built, year after year, in France and around the world. In so doing, we shall encounter countless objects of study, names, tenets, and debates. We shall witness the birth of concepts now central to how we apprehend and intervene in the social world. We shall follow solidly woven lines of thought and look on as others fray and fall apart. From the cultural diagnosis of Theodor W. Adorno to the gender trouble introduced by Judith Butler, from the long time frame of Fernand Braudel’s “Mediterranean” to Randall Collins’s analysis of micro-situations of violence, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s kinship systems to Anna Tsing’s mushroom growing amid the ruins of capitalism—this book portrays the discontinuous, multifaceted endeavor of the social sciences while showing it to be a pursuit sustained by a common effort and project.

Strikingly, no one has addressed this challenge before. It is as though the social sciences, despite being constituted as such for nearly a century and a half, still struggle to grasp what confers their unity. To portray their development, they have relied on discipline-specific retrospectives and anthologies rather than focusing on how they conjointly drive a movement that is central to contemporary thought. And it is precisely this whole, composed of many different fields, that we seek to capture. For, in addition to being connected by intellectual dynamics, transfers, and debates, these disciplines share a common position vis-à-vis the life sciences and, above all, partake in a common project—adding to the collective reflexivity of contemporary societies and furthering our critiques of ethnocentric bias.

This emancipating project is, to our minds, the crucial element. If the social sciences merit the energies expended on them, it is because they increase our collective capacity to view our societies and their institutions in a denaturalizing light. The movement by which they tirelessly explore the infinite variety of human practices, via the methods and techniques they have devised, is in fact related to their capacity to peel away the veneer of obviousness overlaying our behavior and reveal that a form of necessity, yet equally of arbitrariness, influences our collective organization. This is the emancipating effect of the social sciences—an effect they could not relinquish if they wished to. In studying human life in all its diverse manifestations, the social sciences bring to light its foundations, which, though biologically determined, are fashioned perhaps primarily by sociohistorical forces.

Doing Social Science

Paying tribute to this emancipating effect entails exhibiting the shape it takes in each book presented. It also demands that we address not just a specialist readership but all those who appreciate the social sciences for the knowledge and freedom they bring. But making these books simpler and more accessible does not imply forgoing discussion of their technical dimensions, particularly the place held by the (at times difficult) problems of method in the debates driving the social sciences. Any attempt to erase what makes them more than simple statements about the social world would belie them. Our discussion thus necessarily covers investigation protocols, data-gathering techniques, critical analysis of sources, and tools for comparison and analysis, taking in, as a corollary, the production of concepts and theoretical frameworks. This technical aspect is what “disciplines” each social science, based on established procedures for investigation and reflexivity. These dimensions also relate to the fundamentally collective nature of working in the social sciences (even when the undertaking crystallizes around a name) and to the existence of research communities, whose development and autonomy of judgment undergird advances in knowledge. In addition to focusing on what these books state, it is thus important to further examine how they ground what they say. It is likewise important to pay attention to how each partakes in a series of research debates preceding it, often modifying the parameters and subsequent course of these debates, which amounts to raising the issue of the cumulative nature of knowledge in the social sciences. We have called on some of the leading specialists currently working in France and elsewhere in the various disciplinary fields and objects of study. They go over how the publication of each book represented an event in its field, explain the effects the book produced on scientific debate, and specify where the interest lies today, without immuring each book from the living context of research or enshrining it as a museum piece cut off from any scientific tradition or collective undertaking.

This approach is intended as a dual tribute to the social sciences community. First, in bringing these books and researchers together, we wished to emphasize intergenerational solidarity. From the Second World War through to the present day, each new generation of researchers has received from the preceding one the technical and intellectual training without which they would have been incapable of producing their own works. This solidarity, however, is not merely a matter of acknowledging this legacy: rather, it entails appropriation through critique, carrying the legacy forward by building up a distance from predecessors’ thought and approach, thereby opening up new vistas. Second, by calling on so many authors, we also wished to profess our vision of the social sciences as a unified whole. Such a vision is currently imperiled by the ongoing trend toward specialization, in which researchers in the social sciences are increasingly viewed as mere “experts” on a given question or domain. This reveals the full extent of the changes to research practices over the past seventy years, illustrating how the advent of mass higher education and, more recently, the managerialization of research output have radically altered what it means to be a researcher in the social sciences, affecting career training, the processes of intellectual consecration, investigation practices, the transmission of research techniques, publication modes, and even the very ethos of the researcher and associated professional ideal. But the interdisciplinary solidarity that we hold dear has not disappeared. A hundred or so researchers have recognized our approach as their own, and the existence of this book may be viewed as an act of resistance, an assertive reminder that the social sciences form a unitary endeavor. Further, this book can be seen as proof that such a project still makes sense to many of us, at a time when other approaches to scientific work—promoting the fragmentation of research fields, emphasizing individual strategies and expertise—are being paraded as a universal model. No doubt projects such as ours will garner ever more support in the future, as the need is felt to move beyond the dynamic of hyper-specialization that bleeds all reflexivity dry and turns the social sciences away from their emancipatory project. 

Better than a Pantheon

It took an institutional event to trigger the opportunity to profess this unitary and emancipatory vision and to tackle this challenge—namely, the seventieth anniversary in 2017 of the creation of a new department devoted to “economic and social sciences” at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). As is widely recognized, the department’s creation in 1947 was of major scientific importance in France at that time. It is equally acknowledged that this was the kernel of the institution that developed and then acquired autonomy in 1975 as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where the editors of this book work. This fortuitous occasion to go back over the previous seventy years of the social sciences was the germ whence this book grew.

Our readers will thus better understand why we settled on the period 1947–2017. But we still need to explain how we went about our undertaking—that is, how we selected, chose, and prioritized such and such a book. To tackle this obviously irresoluble problem, the five editors met on numerous occasions in 2016. During these meetings, our group engaged in fierce discussions. Although we had fixed the objective of drawing up a list of 100 or so books published since 1947, new and “indispensable” books kept on coming and asserting their right to be included. It was only very gradually, painfully, that we whittled down our list to 101 titles, rather than 100, which is too neat, too tidy a number. The figure also invites others to continually reopen and enrich this selection and, as far as possible, lessens the impression inherent to this type of project that the works listed are somehow the “best.”

There was never any question in our minds of restricting our selection to an abridged series of canonized authors, supposedly equating to some golden age of the social sciences around the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it was a matter of following the social sciences as an ongoing endeavor, characterized by its ups and downs, surprises, and fluctuations in intensity. We decided that each year was to be represented, and no author, however influential, was to appear more than once. We also opted to follow these disciplines through to the present day while remaining alert to the difficulties occasioned by lacking the requisite distance to pick our way surely through the most recent output. Lastly, we wished to limit imbalances between disciplines, between French and non-French authors, between men and women, and between historical periods and cultural areas, though our selection is obviously marked by the social conditions of research—mostly male, mostly European and American—during the period under consideration and by our project having been carried out at the heart of a French institution. So, this work is not a little pantheon. It is less monumental and less fettered. Our readers are invited to circulate freely among the books, not to admire them. Nor is it the result of a selection that could be described as objective, as if criteria could exist wholly detached from the sociohistorical situation of those choosing. We have no such radical conception of objectivity. It is clear to our minds that our choices are necessarily situated.

First, our choices are situated in time, for it is necessarily from where our disciplines now stand that we have scrutinized their pasts, looking for works that have come down through the years, standing out as “noteworthy” or “remarkable,” even as “foundational” or “representative” of a current they themselves did not envisage. But rather than engaging with the works of the past from the standpoint of our expectations, we have reconsidered them from theirs—thus arguments that have become selfevident are rehearsed afresh with the novelty they had when formulated.

Second, our selections are situated in space, for our enterprise, conducted in a French research establishment, which assumes a standpoint toward the global history of the social sciences (no doubt a very different one from that our American colleagues would have assumed if asked to draw up such a list). However, we considered the importance attached to the selected titles in places outside France and Europe. Thus, though clearly “situated,” our approach is driven by a constant effort to decenter it in both time and space.

Clashes and Choices

Our overall line led us to embrace a certain number of deliberate choices. The first and main such choice is to adopt the standpoint of the social sciences rather than of a particular discipline. That does not mean championing some flat, bland vision of the social sciences. Rather, we profess a more structured vision, drawing notably on the history of the EPHE economics and social science department and what it owed to the Annales school.1 We are mindful of what Jean-Claude Passeron has called the “epistemological indiscernibility”2 of the three disciplines underpinning the social sciences—history, anthropology, and sociology. Around this base is a constellation of other disciplines with fundamentally different epistemologies—law, linguistics, philosophy, the history of art, literary studies, economics, the cognitive sciences, and so on. The whole interest of their interaction with the three underpinning disciplines springs, of course, from this difference. Admittedly, placing certain disciplines at the center and others on the periphery is in itself controversial. Clearly, the way in which the social sciences figure the relationships between their constitutive fields sparks clashes. Additionally, while these three disciplines are the main force behind the social sciences, it is only conjointly, not singly, that they impart this drive, drawing on the exchanges, theoretical debates, and questionings issuing from the surrounding disciplines grounded in another epistemology and affecting them. One has only to think, for example, of the emblematic role played by linguistics in the 1960s.

A second deliberate choice, which is important to us, is to honor a particular form of scholarship—namely, books published under the author’s (or authors’) name. Changes currently favor the article and, to a lesser extent, chapter in a joint volume from a conference or colloquium. For its part, the world of publishing encourages social science researchers to produce brief essays, textbooks, and other “contributions.” All these formats have their merits, meeting the requirements of different publics while adding to the production and raising the profile of the social sciences. But historically, the publication of books has assuredly been central to building the social sciences, and it is the main means by which they have forged their reputation with the general public. Our choice to privilege books as the preeminent form of scholarly output explains why a certain number of important works—particularly articles—do not figure on our list, and nor do specific journal issues, dictionaries, or encyclopedias. This place granted to books does not issue solely from one of the essential differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences (in which the seminal format is the article). It also expresses the tie linking them—from the outset —to the world of the literature.3 The social sciences have an irreducibly hermeneutic and narrative dimension that stems not solely from their object of study (human activities and their historical transformations) but also from the type of labor they require, which entails framing reality as an enigma, seeking to “speak true.” This demands, or should demand, that none shirk the task of voicing and being mindful of the issues involved in describing and categorizing reality. Here once again, not everyone will agree. Within our little editorial group, for that matter, the literary question gave rise to lively debates—and the place accorded to matters of form, the feeling that the “essay” is an inherently dignified genre, or the belief that the effort involved in writing is central to all thinking, did not always emerge victorious. Claiming that one format of scholarly output has primacy, or denouncing how it is treated by our epoch, necessarily figures among the issues at stake in clashes within the highly diverse world of research and could not transpire in a different light.

Which History of the Social Sciences?

In offering a renewed, updated, and internationalized perspective on the major (together with some lesser known) works in the repository of knowledge built up by the social sciences, the panorama we sketch allows us to gauge changes in these sciences, together with the directions in which they have evolved. This book assumes these constraints and, thanks to its collaborative nature, is strongly placed to set out these discontinuities and attendant effects of convergence and densification, thus highlighting the major lines of change. One of the lines of change—perhaps the most flagrant, and in no way a discovery, but with a notable inflection over the decades studied here—is the curve traced by structuralist thought, from its emergence just after the Second World War through its domination in the 1960s, followed by its supposed decline. Did the social sciences, under the aegis of the idea of structure, manage to demonstrate their unity to themselves and triumph awhile, before researchers, naturally given to critique, set about dismantling this unifying belief? Some such nostalgic and disillusioned vision is hawked in accounts that abridge the social sciences to what they are held to have been in the 1960s—some “golden age” corresponding to that of their “great names.” But the path we follow allows us to see things differently and to recognize in the very critique of structuralism (commencing in the 1970s and flourishing as of the 1980s), in its reappraisals and rereadings, a renewed expression of the unity of the social sciences. This critical movement borrows from one discipline to the next such similar schema (emphasizing agency, refusing totalizations, paying attention to situational constraints, etc.), makes methodological recommendations that so frequently converge, and operates on such a scale that we are fully entitled to view the phase on which the social sciences embarked thirty or so years ago in a different light. This view is no longer based on the idea of decline or crisis—characterized by dispersal, fragmentation, and powerlessness even—but on the conviction that this phase exhibits a multiform yet common effort to move beyond the limits of the structuralist enterprise and to take further the goal of denaturing the social world. Starting in the 1990s, on most university campuses around the world involved in teaching and practicing the social sciences, the common language across disciplines tended to center on the idea of “social constructs,” which emerged as the most significant marker of these sciences’ contribution to public debate. From there, we may trace a second evolution, relating to the importance acquired by feminist studies, together with colonial, subaltern, and postcolonial studies. Feminist studies appeared in the late 1940s, and the others surfaced during the 1950s. It was only during the 1970s and the 1980s, however, that they genuinely took off in English-speaking academia.

It took a while for them to reach France, where they were received critically. Yet here, too—though admittedly in the central disciplines of the social sciences rather than in the fields organized into “studies”—they sparked renewed interest in matters of sex, gender, colonization, empire, and domination, steering research in the social sciences toward rehabilitating the “agency” of the dominated. In this case, no doubt more than others, the social sciences show how they are united around a common project to increase reflexivity within societies: In enabling subjects to denaturalize traditional relations of domination, the transformations to these societies gave feminist, subaltern, and postcolonial arguments an everexpanding audience and reach. In return, social science methods have been profoundly modified: confronting hitherto unsuspected practical difficulties, they now seek to better “symmetrize” the point of view of the dominant and the dominated and to avoid importing the prejudices of the dominant enswathed within their conceptualizations and research procedures.

Let us mention one final evolution, which arguably lies at the heart of how we experience the contemporary world: the change in how the social sciences apprehend humanity as a whole and the limits of our planet. Here, it is the questioning of the nation-state that is the crucial element. Constructivist thought once again played a prime role here, making it possible to flush out the overly naturalizing aspects in the conceptions that the social sciences (often unconsciously) favor for apprehending such entities as “nations,” “societies,” and “ethnic groups.” Hence the effort to “deconstruct” these notions and conceive of the realities they overlay as performances rather than as givens. Hence, too, the devising of innovative instruments, primarily methodological, to successfully vary the scales of analysis for apprehending phenomena and for thinking of social activities in terms of “networks,” without being hidebound by the preexisting blueprint afforded by social groups and borders. This is the viewpoint from which to understand the singular importance that, since the 2000s, the social sciences have attached to the dynamics of capitalism, the loss of state sovereignty, the failures in regulating (and thinking about) the ecological crisis, and the depletion of natural resources—all of which require us to extricate our analysis from a viewpoint centered on nation-states. Here, once again, the social sciences show how they are connected to evolutions in the societies within which they develop. By taking globalization as their object and conceiving of their task within this movement, they summon us to be mindful of the sociohistorical conditions engendering them and assert their genuinely political role.

Cyril Lemieux, Laurent Berger, Marielle Macé, Gildas Salmon, and Cécile Vidal

ON SOCIALISM

 

The Making of British Socialism Mark Bevir (2011)

Chapter 1 Introduction: Socialism and History 1

Chapter 2 The Victorian Context 22

Part One: The Marxists 43

Chapter 3 Ernest Belfort Bax 45

Chapter 4 Henry Mayers Hyndman 65

Chapter 5 William Morris 85

Chapter 6 The Social Democratic Federation 106

Part Two: The Fabians 129

Chapter 7 Theories of Rent 131

Chapter 8 George Bernard Shaw 152

Chapter 9 Sidney Webb 173

Chapter 10 Permeation and Independent Labor 195

Part Three: The Ethical Socialists 215

Chapter 11 Welfarism, Socialism, and Religion 217

Chapter 12 American Romanticism and British Socialism 235

Chapter 13 Ethical Anarchism 256

Chapter 14 The Labour Church Movement 278

Conclusion

Socialism, Labor, and the State 298

This book has been a long time in the making. I first began working on the history of British socialism in the late 1980s. Back then, Margaret Thatcher’s governments loomed large over my political world. Critics portrayed socialism as a discredited statist ideology. Even socialists sometimes implied that it was an outdated class-based ideology. Yet, I wanted to recapture the diversity of socialism and thereby find inspiration for a radical democratic and transformative politics that rejected market individualism for egalitarian fellowship. I thought British socialists needed a new narrative with which to respond to neoliberalism. One reason this book has been so long in the making is that in the 1990s the Labour Party provided just such a narrative. New Labour presented itself as adhering to historic socialist “ends” while adopting new “means.” The old socialist “means” had allegedly been made irrelevant by the rise of new times. The advancement of socialism now supposedly required supply-side economics, capacity building, and networks and partnerships delivering services. Although I was impressed by the energy and vigor of the New Labour project, its narrative and politics were not what I had had in mind. I got distracted from the history of British socialism by the desire to come to terms with its present.

The reader will find that this book still echoes my early aim of providing a more diverse portrait of socialism. Socialism has never been just about class-based politics and state intervention. It has never been the caricature depicted by Mrs. Thatcher; nor has it been the preserve of the Labour Party and its leaders. On the contrary, British socialism has always included radical democratic, pluralist, and utopian strands. Many socialists have promoted nongovernmental visions of personal and social transformation. They have envisaged more simple and cooperative ways of life.

I hope this book will help to correct widespread misconceptions about the history and nature of socialism. I also hope that it will contribute, even if only ever-so slightly, to attempts to forge more fulfilling ways of living with one another and the natural world of which we are part.

Why You Should be a Socialist Nathan Robinson (2019)

In Part I, we will discuss how examining the world honestly and humanely produces a “socialistic instinct,” one that is frustrated by unnecessary injustices and unsatisfied with popular rationalizations of those injustices. We’ll use that instinct to examine the world and try to understand precisely what features of contemporary political and economic systems are so revolting to the left sensibility. We’ll also clear away some of the tempting myths advanced by defenders of free markets and social hierarchies.

Next, in Part II, I will talk about how that basic moral instinct can help us formulate a particular set of socialist principles—valuing solidarity, equality, and freedom. Then I will look at the long and honorable tradition of socialist thinking, paying particular attention to libertarian socialism and the great socialists of the United States. After that, I’ll talk explicitly about the kind of vision and ambition that these principles produce, laying out some of the utopian ideals that are worth thinking about. Then, we’ll get into some of the frustrating terminological discussions about socialism, democratic socialism, libertarian socialism, social democracy, liberalism, etcetera. (We will try to get this sorted out as quickly as possible, so that everyone can go home early.) Then, we’ll see how conventional political ideas failed, and why the world needs a socialist political response. I’ll explain what a strong left agenda would look like and give some suggestions for strategies to move it forward.

In Part III, I will deal with alternatives and criticisms. I’ll explain why conservatism is cruel and liberalism is oblivious. I’ll respond to common critiques of the left, examining why they all fail and everyone should reject them. I will conclude with a rousing call to arms for the new generation of democratic socialists who will make life better for billions of people around the world.

The Richer, the Poorer – how New Labour enriched the few and failed the poor 
Stewart Lansley (2021)

This book examines the multiple and changing mechanisms that link

wealth and poverty. These links have shifted in line with the model of capitalism in place, the strength of democratic structures and societal pressure, the restraints imposed on the owners of capital and the lengths to which business and financial elites have been prepared to go to preserve their wealth, power and privileges. Through much of the nineteenth century, wealth was synonymous with political power. Britain was a near- plutocracy, a society run by and mostly for the richest sections of society who were able to firewall their wealth and status. Some concessions on working conditions and welfare were granted, if only because of fear of the consequences of inaction. The dominant philosophy – a belief in individual liberty, free markets and limited democracy – showed little concern with the lot of the governed. Ricardo’s distribution question was to be settled by the outcome of the play of market forces. The question of help for the losers from economic change was considered by mainstream thinking to be a matter of conscience and of private benevolence.

The great personal wealth boom of the nineteenth century was built largely off the back of a cheap and weakly organised labour force. Unrestrained industrial capitalism, eventually tempered by the rise of trade unions, new pressure groups and investment in social infrastructure, did deliver improvements in average living standards, but this was an uneven path. Social progress for most was slow and hard fought, and lagged behind the economic gains enjoyed by the financial, landowning and professional classes. 

In Praise of Social Democracy Political Quarterly Roy Hattersley (2012)

Both prominent Bevanites (most notably Dick Crossman) and leading Bennites (including Benn himself) argued that it was better to wait in opposition for the inevitable crisis of capitalism at which point socialism would triumph than to abandon core principles in a desperate attempt to accommodate the average voter in a more affluent society.

A by-product of that view is the fraudulent claim by left-wing Labour that they alone are the keepers of the party’s soul.

Ironically, New Labour reflected the mirror image of that view. Its adherents also argue that a choice has to be made between principle and power and that, since Opposition equates to impotence, it is necessary to compromise in order to win office. One of New Labour’s defining characteristics was the willingness to jettison ‘unelectable’ principles and policies in order to get into power. This was the clear assumption after Blair became the Labour Leader in 1994, and the position was given considerable force by the party suffering the indignity of being out of power for so long. Once in government, the Labour party continued to act in a way which suggested that there was no justification in seeking to move decisively leftwards in the face of immovable public opinion, globalisation and a right-wing media—that there was no alternative to a very cautious centre/centre left policy stance. The general election defeat of 1992 was offered as evidence that the electorate would never consider voting in sufficient numbers for an overtly social democratic policy platform and some even became critical of John Smith’s alleged belief that ‘one more push’ would see the Labour party returned to office at the next general election. Once in power, New Labour redistributed by stealth while claiming not to be concerned about the proliferation of the ‘filthy rich’ and—mistaking or being unaware of Michael Young’s analysis—thought that meritocracy was a condition devoutly to be wished. The moral was clear. A party led by a Prime Minister who, on television, could not bring himself even to regret the widening gap between rich and poor, would never dare to mount a real attack on poverty.

In the Labour party the fatalism of left and right coincide. The conflict between power and principle is deemed to be fundamental. The party cannot have both. Labour could either pursue power or defend its ideological purity. And New Labour believed, or claimed to believe, that the victory of 1997 confirmed that necessity of accepting the abandonment of principles which it called ‘reality’. Anyone who has read Robert Worcester’s Explaining Labour’s Landslide realises that the Tory defeat was inevitable in 1997.

The distinctive feature of Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign, and ultimately the reason why he was elected, was his clear belief that power and principle could go together. His message was that Labour should have confidence in its ideology and that the promotion of social democratic aims and values is essential to securing victory. New Labour lost because it was not ideological enough. It was never intellectually confident and never, while in office, seriously sought to reshape public opinion. Before 2007 many of Gordon Brown’s supporters believed that the Labour government would be more radical once he became Leader. Apart from a short-lived honeymoon period in the first few months of his premiership, the Labour party appeared to lack any sense of ideological direction for most of his time in power. The likelihood is that he possessed one of the attributes that led to Miliband’s victory in Labour’s leadership election. He believed, but he did not dare. Ed Miliband laid claim to be part of a different tradition within the Labour party: the certainty that the pursuit of power and the commitment to social democratic ideals go together. Arguably such a stance was the one held by Hugh Gaitskell as Leader of the Labour party between 1955 and 1963, where he sought to respond to changing economic and social conditions of the day while, at the same time, setting out a clear ideological vision centred on a commitment to equality.

Tony Crosland became the intellectual exponent of that view. He was said to be on the ‘right’ of the Labour party because he supported the Atlantic Alliance, endorsed (with limited enthusiasm) what was then the Common Market and refused to believe that socialism was synonymous public ownership. But, not only was he the most consistent advocate of greater equality in Labour’s history, he was one of the fiercest critics of the Wilson government of 1964–70 for its lack of radicalism in its economic policy and the most effective critic of the imposition of austerity in response to the ‘IMF Crisis’ of 1976. Indeed, he refused to be associated with the ‘right’ of the party in the 1970s, believing that they were far too willing to compromise, and instead perceiving himself to be a ‘centrist’ in terms of Labour’s ideological spectrum.

Moreover, we claim that only the state can do certain things fairly. In this we mean that the pursuit of equality is only possible with a central state committed to the establishment of a national minimum welfare standard. In some cases there may actually be more welfare as a result of devolution and decentralisation. However, it is also conceivable that some wealthier communities once empowered to provide local services would seek to reduce welfare provision and standards in their area thus creating more inequality. Only a central state committed to equality could intervene to avoid such inequalities occurring, but in making such interventions the autonomy of local communities is undermined. The priority attached to equality is justified since it is one consequence of having greater equality that individuals can then participate as active citizens. It is not just ‘community’ which is important to social democrats, but the type of community.

There are several recent examples of economic and welfare policy where there has been evidence of too little state intervention rather than too much. The challenge of an increasingly elderly population is likely to require more state intervention not less. Moreover, despite the problems of the single currency, the domestic economies of France and Germany have been better able to respond to the challenge of the banking crisis as their governments have ensured that they have a more secure manufacturing base than rival economies like that of Britain which were over-reliant on banking and so were particularly exposed to the collapse of financial services.

Support for the minimal state is, in part, a product of the belief that the unrestricted market is invariably the best way to guarantee efficiency and encourage growth. We agree that a market—in much of the economy—is an essential feature of a free and prosperous society. But evidence confirms that the market is not the best way to improve the performance, or allocate resources within, the public services and those privatised industries which were once, in the words of the 1950s’ legislation, ‘managed on behalf of the people’. New Labour promoted the internal market in the health service to the undoubted detriment of the provision for some patients.

The Potters Bar train crash resulted from the neglect of railway maintenance—a typical example of unjustifiable market cost cutting. Social democrats believe the market is often, but not always, the best way to regulate the economy. The creation of a strong and just society relies on an active central state and in current conditions there would be popular support for more economic intervention based on clear social democratic principles. When a child dies of neglect or parent brutality, cattle are threatened by the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, rivers flood or unemployment dramatically rises, the cry goes up for the state to do more.

RISK ANALYSIS

I was just about to post about Socialism – having come across several books on that theme – but instead have chose to post about the rather arcane and technical subject of risk analysis, with a recent government publication on the subject viz Chronic Risks Analysis (HMSO 2025) from which I’ve taken the following extracts -

Example mitigations 
 
HM Government (2024) Climate Change Act 2008 the UK aims to achieve 

net zero emissions by 2050, with the Government’s mission to transform Britain 

into a Clean Energy Superpower as central to this commitment. The Third 

National Adaptation programme (2023-2028) includes a £15 million research 

fund and a Local Authority Climate Service pilot.

DEFRA (2023) The third National adaptation Programme (NAP3) and the 

fourth strategy for climate adaptation reporting The UK has invested £5.2 billion 

in flood defences

• Defra and National Audit Office (2023) Resilience to flooding and contributes up to £60 million internationally for climate related loss and damage.

• PM Office (2023) PM to call for ‘era of action’ at COP28 climate summit 

• Examples of additional benefits from taking action - Mitigating climate change and implementing adaptation measures enhances economic resilience by reducing vulnerability to extreme weather and enabling faster disaster recovery. 

• Climate adaptation actions can support vulnerable communities, promote social equity, reduce poverty, and improve wellbeing by building resilience to climate impacts. 

• Climate action can also improve public health, reduce NHS costs, enhance energy security, and help to preserve and promote biodiversity. 

What the future might hold 
Short-term trajectories: 

• People may increasingly need to remain at home to stay safe from extreme weather, which could have wider implications for the economy. 

• Hotter, drier summers might lead to more heat-related morbidity and mortality, transport disruptions, droughts, water shortages and increased wildfire incidents. 

• Animal welfare issues may emerge as livestock perish in heatwaves, affecting farming livelihoods. Failures in the global agriculture supply chain could lead to food shortages, which would impact health, inflation, social cohesion, and farmers’ incomes. 

Longer-term uncertainties: 

• Rising sea levels could disrupt UK sea ports and impact food imports, while 

overheating data centres caused by hotter climates may disrupt public and emergency services.

• Urban planning could prioritise green spaces and farmers may choose to 

diversify crops, making livelihoods more resilient to climate change 

Insurance companies tend to be the hottest on the trail of climate change – 
with this being a typical warning from the Allianz group - Too Hot 
to Grow (2026). 
But perhaps The Most Radical Post-growth Text is from Wall Street,
one which I’ve just come across yesterday.

SIX MORE

Corrupted Kingdom – Britain’s Disappearing integrity and how we can get it back Robert Barrington (2026) preview only

Our body politic is in many places either infected or at risk of infection, but this lies 
beneath the surface. Our antibodies have until now been able to keep the infection 
in check, but the infection is getting worse – and the defences are getting weaker. 
It sounds pretty bad, and there is a risk that a book such as this will add to the doom 
and gloom of the nation. That is by no means my intention. On the contrary, I hope 
that by applying the lens of corruption analysis to institutions and events that are in 
many cases already well known, we will get closer to understanding the problem 
– and therefore be better placed to deal with it. My underlying approach is that 
understanding and evidence are the basis of good policymaking. After all, if we 
have a sound analysis of the problem, we are more likely to find solutions that are 
fit for purpose. This brings to mind a saying from Einstein: ‘If I had an hour to 
solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five 
minutes thinking about solutions.’ In this country, we do not spend enough time 
thinking about whether corruption is a problem. If we were more aware, we might 
appreciate that while corruption does not explain everything about contemporary 
Britain, it can explain a great deal about political leadership, economic growth and 
the decline of our key institutions. While researching this book, I have often been 
asked what is going wrong with Britain – and whether corruption is the cause. 
Many people share a sense that things are out of kilter and are unsure where 
the country is heading. In fact, Britain may be experiencing what corruption 
analysts call a ‘big bang’ moment: a point when a country can choose between 
two paths – one that leads to more corruption or another that brings it under control. 
I often encounter deep-state conspiracy theories about the City and the 
Establishment. For example, that the outsourcing of so many public services to 
the private sector is driven by a small cabal of politicians, financiers and business 
leaders who want to feather their own nests irrespective of the quality of service 
provided, and that this is enabled by the fact that so many were at the same 
schools and universities together. The truth is both more complex and more 
worrying. As I will demonstrate, there are many pockets of corruption in the UK, 
sometimes barely kept in check by a set of weakened institutions. There is no 
single group pulling the strings, but corruption can be damaging without being 
coordinated. This comes against a background  without being coordinated. 
This comes against a background of some deep-rooted issues like increasing 
inequality, economic stagnation and political instability, constituting a series of 
social, economic and political threats to our national well-being. 
These are prime conditions for corruption to thrive, which gives rise to an 
uncomfortable reality: the corruption in this country may not yet have been 
as damaging as in other countries, but we should not believe the UK is immune, 
and there may be worse to come if corrective action is not taken. 
Based on thousands of interviews and conversations with everyone from 
ex-offenders to ex-prime ministers, this book explores the links between 
important contemporary ideas such as chumocracy and Londongrad, as well as 
high-profile issues like corruption in the Metropolitan Police and the monarchy. 
Britain is complacent about corruption, but the threats are rising and the defences 
are weakened. The rotten apples are starting to look like a rotting barrel. 
As a country, we can avoid waking up to the silent spring. If we do not act, 
we may move into illiberal democracy, state capture or systemic corruption. 
But there is an alternative. We could use integrity and standards to refuel 
Britain’s national well-being and international reputation. 
The choice is ours to make.  
The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism Matt McManus 2025

The Ukraine War and the Eurasian world order Glen Diesen (2024)

The book answers the research question: To what extent does the Ukraine War influence the world order? The book focuses primarily on the West’s actions as it has been the collective hegemon and main custodian of the world order over the past centuries. Subsequently, it focuses on the West’s failure to offer common rules to prevent and resolve conflict.

Instead, the unipolar world order contributed to, instigated and prolonged the Ukraine War. Exploring the war as a consequence of a collapsing world order should not be interpreted as supporting or legitimising the war. To answer this research question, the book first outlines the theoretical assumptions about world order and explores the rise of the Western-centric world order, providing an overview of the foundations of world order. Thereafter, it explores the rise and decline of the world order defined as liberal hegemony after the Cold War, and the significance of NATO expansion on the unravelling of the pan-European security architecture and a common world order. In the second part of the book, the Ukrainian crisis is explored as a key battleground for determining the preservation or abandonment of liberal hegemony. These chapters explore the rivalry for influence between 1991 and 2014, the civil war between 2014 and 2022 following the coup, and the Russian invasion from 2022. The final chapter outlines how the emergence of a Eurasian world order has intensified because of the Ukraine War. It is concluded that the world is entering a turbulent time as the Ukraine War has ended liberal hegemony, yet a multipolar Westphalian system has not yet asserted itself. 

Chapter two theorises the concept of world order. The modern world order originating with the Peace of Westphalia is contrasted with the incentives of restoring a Pax Romana system to transcend the international anarchy with hegemony and universal values. The balance of power is also translated into a geoeconomic “balance of dependence” to explore how the disruption of the Industrial Revolution altered the mercantilist system. The struggle for world order is theorised to represent a series of dilemmas such as a balance of power versus hegemony, cultural distinctiveness versus universalism, and order versus justice.

Chapter three explores the rise of the Western-centric world order. Military superiority and control over the maritime transportation corridors enabled the rise of a Western-centric world from the early 16th century, which advanced further as the Industrial Revolution endowed the West with economic statecraft from the late 18th century. The world order was reformed by liberal principles due to the American and French Revolutions, the transformation of industrial capitalism, and the subsequent rise of ideologies following the First World War. The influence of economic and political liberalism on world order became a reflection of the international distribution of power.

Chapter four addresses Pax Americana, the new world order of liberal hegemony. After the Cold War, there were debates about the case for and against constructing a world order based on unipolarity and liberalism visà-vis restoring a balance of power. The hegemonic system lacked sustainability as the U.S. became reliant on military interventionism, exhausted its resources, failed to address domestic problems, suffered from declining legitimacy in the world, and inadvertently incentivised foreign powers to rival the U.S. in terms of military power, geoeconomics and political institutions.

Chapter five analyses the decline of liberalism as the organising principle of the world order. Liberal hegemony replaced international law with the rules-based international order and reinvented diplomacy as a subject-object civilising mission. The excesses of political and economic liberalism undermined the foundation for social cohesion, and a new authoritarian liberalism made it increasingly difficult for the West to present itself as a teacher of democracy. Cultural decline weakened soft power, the military-industrial complex corrupted democracy and governance, domestic political squabbles increasingly influenced foreign policy, and the concept of global civil society became a tool of state power.

Chapter six explores NATO expansion and the collapse of pan-European security and a common world order. After the Cold War, two rival models for world order emerged that influenced the European security architecture. A Westphalian balance of power system represented by an inclusive pan-European security architecture was institutionalised with the establishment of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was based on indivisible security, sovereign equality, and a Europe without dividing lines. Concurrently, liberal hegemony in Europe manifested itself by expanding NATO, which implied abandoning the pan-European security agreements based on the Helsinki Accords, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, and the OSCE. Many American and European leaders cautioned that NATO expansionism would revive the East-West division of Europe and possibly start another Cold War. Yet, the new dividing lines also revived an ideological divide as all subsequent tensions were largely interpreted through the heuristics of a wider struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Diplomacy degenerated, arms treaties collapsed, and the security dilemma intensified. 

Chapter seven analyses how Ukraine became a pawn on the European chessboard between 1991 and 2014. Ukraine was destined to become the centre of a proxy conflict between a liberal hegemony and a Westphalian world order as Ukraine is a divided country in a divided Europe. Nationbuilding in post-Soviet Ukraine has been troubled by the lack of unifying narratives and identity. The ethnic, cultural, and linguistic connectivity between Ukrainians and Russians became a double-edged sword as the closeness eroded the distinctiveness required for full sovereignty. While Eastern Ukrainians commonly defined relations with Russians as a “fraternal bond,” Western Ukrainians tend to interpret the shared history as imperialism that diluted and undermined the development of a distinctive Ukrainian identity. Russia placed its support behind the Eastern Ukrainians and the West backed the Western Ukrainian nationalists due to competing visions of a regional order and world order in terms of the distribution of power and values.

Chapter eight outlines the Ukrainian Civil War sparked by the Western-backed coup in February 2014. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for Donbas brought the liberal hegemonic order under great strain. Hegemony, liberal values, and international law required a principled rejection of Russia’s incursion. Yet, the hegemonic order was supported by backing far-right nationalists that would purge the Russian-friendly elements in society and set Ukraine on a path to war. The new government in Kiev suppressed the Russian language, culture, and the Orthodox Church while it also purged the media and opposition parties, including the arrest of the opposition leader. Meanwhile, the West used the UN-approved Minsk Agreement to buy time to arm and train Ukraine which was becoming a de facto member of NATO.

Chapter nine explores the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the proxy war that ensued. NATO’s reluctance to prevent the war, the sabotage of peace negotiations after the Russian invasion, and the continued escalations are indicative of the failure of world order and what is at stake. NATO’s objective to weaken Russia as a strategic rival and send a clear signal to China could bring new energy to liberal hegemony, while a Russian victory could restore a balance of power system. As the war dragged on, the geostrategic objective of weakening Russia no longer harmonised with the goal of “helping Ukraine,” and NATO began to display its intent more overtly to “fight to the last Ukrainian.”

Chapter ten analyses the emergence of the Eurasian world order that intensified because of the Ukraine War. Russia, China, and other Eurasian states had already diversified their economic connectivity and aspired for a multipolar system for several years as the international distribution of power shifted. Yet, the war demonstrated the urgency of decoupling from the economic dependence on the West and it collapsed the normative justification of liberal hegemony. Irrespective of the military outcome, the war revealed multipolar realities as the world outside NATO did not accept the West’s narrative, did not join sanctions, and instead accommodated Russia economically and politically. Eurasian states are spearheading the transition to a multi-polar Westphalian world order with Eurasian characteristics. Western maritime powers lose their competitive advantage to Eurasian land powers as new autonomous centres of power emerge that reject liberal universalism in favour of civilisational distinctiveness. It is concluded that the world is entering a period of disorder as the world is between liberal hegemony and multipolarity. States that adapt to the multipolar realities will thrive and those that resist the necessary adjustments will contribute to war.

Stalingrad Vasily Grossman (2019)

How Westminster Worked – and why it doesn’t Ian Dunt (2023)

The book starts with an interesting case-study of how a hapless MP who just happened to be one Anthony Grayland selected a topic to make a mark – the privatisation of prisons and the mess he then made of it. Dunt then turns to the selection of MPs - the most important moment in British democracy happens when no one’s watching. It’s not the general election. The majority of votes at the election will be completely ignored. It comes long before that, in a room filled with party members, when they work out who is ultimately going to become an MP.

It’s called selection, and it’s the process by which candidates are picked to stand for a party at election time. It involves the headquarters of each political party – the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and others. And it involves their constituency parties – the local organisations and their memberships. No one ever really talks about it. The British press spends far more time covering the Iowa caucus in the US than it does any of the pre-election procedures in the UK. But this moment decides who sits on the benches in the Commons or the chairs around the Cabinet table. It is the defining mechanism for establishing the talent pool in Westminster, from which everyone, up to and including the prime minister, will be chosen.

It happens behind closed doors, away from prying eyes, on the basis of a subsection of a subsection of a subsection of voters, with weak-to-nonexistent democratic standards, according to a set of incentives that bear no relation to MPs’ constitutional role.

CHAPTER 1 The Vote

CHAPTER 2 The Members of Parliament

CHAPTER 3 The Power

CHAPTER 4 The Ministers

CHAPTER 5 The Treasury

CHAPTER 6 The Civil Service

CHAPTER 7 The Press

Interlude: Evacuation

CHAPTER 8 The Commons

CHAPTER 9 The Law

CHAPTER 10 The Lords

Epilogue: Solutions

The Real Economy – history and theory Jonathan Levy (2025)

WHAT IS the economy? My aim in this book is to provide an answer to this

question, for the purpose of better studying the economy, its history, and its

politics. The larger hope is that the chapters herein might contribute to a

much-needed discussion in the social sciences and humanities about the

subject at hand, what the economy really is.

Why pose the question? Are there not already economists, economic

historians, economic anthropologists, economic sociologists, practitioners

of political economy or law and economics, or normative theorists of

economic justice and democracy? What is it they are doing if they are not

already studying the economy? And if that is what they are up to, must there

not already exist robust accounts (if not exactly shared ones) of what the

economy is—a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” a domain of

“materiality” or “material subsistence,” the “gross domestic product,” or

some other construction?

There are not—or at least not, in my view, adequate accounts. Long

preoccupied with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics

risks losing sight of the economy. Preoccupied with either appropriating or

criticizing the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to

articulate an alternative conception of the economy. Therefore, no discipline

in the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of the

economy. The absence is the motivating concern that lies at the heart of this

book. To elaborate an account that is adequate, my strategy has been

essentially to start over again from the beginning, asking some of the most

fundamental questions, in search of the most basic building blocks.

The path will, occasionally, wind. The topics and themes of the book are

various, as is the mode of exposition, which span historical narrative,

empirical description, exegesis, and abstract theorizing. The chapters

include a range of what might seem disparate topics: the economics of

ancient Egyptian pyramid building; the meaning of “radical uncertainty”;

theories of corporate personality leading up to the US Supreme Court case

Citizens United (2010); Keynes’s notion of “demand” in The General

Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money; debates in psychoanalysis

about the correct understanding of desire; the nineteenth-century

intellectual discovery of “altruism”; the Chinese demand for holding

American silver in the sixteenth century and US treasury bills in the twentyfirst; economic theories of capital; the story of Thorstein Veblen’s firing

from the University of Chicago. However, throughout there is an

overarching focus on the nature of the economy, and what developing an

account of the economy might mean for the writing of history (my home

discipline) and for other forms of social scientific and humanistic inquiry.

I should note that I arrived at the theme of the real economy only while

writing what became roughly the first half of the book. A historian very

much of my generation, which came of age after the global financial crisis

of 2007–2008, my initial concern was with articulating a theory of

capitalism and an account of its history. Soon, however, I discovered that

in fact I could not escape grappling with the problem of the economy—its

underspecified conceptual existence. Doing so, I kept finding myself

repeatedly turning back to an earlier moment in the history of economic

thought.

The book returns in spirit to the era, roughly stretching from the 1890s to

the 1930s, which first gave birth to the discipline of economics. I say

“spirit” because I make no attempt at any direct act of simple retrieval—to

suggest that some old master, or some old book, got the matter right long

ago and for all time. Rather, from this period I have taken inspiration from

the economic “Vision,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once put it. By

Vision, Schumpeter meant a general orientation to the world that inevitably

precedes analysis. In economic analysis, “to posit to ourselves any problems at all,” he wrote, “we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomenon as a worthwhile object of our analytic efforts.”

In Schumpeter’s generation, what many economists were trying to visualize was the economy. This moment—after Marx made the last great contribution to “political economy” but before the triumph of “neoclassical” economics following World War II—was one of “methodological pluralism.” Before the discipline of economics found its bearings in neoclassicism, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of economics and of the economy circulated and competed with one another.

In my encounter with these “years of high theory,” as one perceptive chronicler characterized them, the economics of Keynes and Veblen have loomed the largest.5 Both Veblen and Keynes were economic theorists. Keynes entitled his most important books Treatise on Money and The General Theory, and Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Writing before neoclassicals transformed economic theory into an entirely mathematical affair, when theorizing both preferred verbal exposition (Veblen nearly exclusively). Veblen and Keynes figure in the book most. But so do the economic Visions of a great many twentieth-century economic theorists, even if they do not often crack the text or even the notes. They cross diverse institutionalist, post-Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian, French Regulation, and even neoclassical traditions—from Irving Fisher to John Hicks, Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight, Joan Robinson, Albert Hirschman, Nicholas Kaldor, and others. If in different ways, all first cultivated or sought to carry forward the rich legacies of pre–World War II economic theory.

By revisiting traditions of literary economic theorizing that, if not completely lost, have long been overshadowed in the discipline of economics, and have not often been considered outside of it, my goal is to articulate a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical study from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, across the social sciences and humanities. Perhaps the effort will be of interest to contemporary economists, working in any tradition. My ambition is to convince non-economists in the interpretive social sciences and humanities that there are traditions in economic theory of ecumenical interest, no less than traditions in, say, philosophy, social theory, cultural theory, or political theory. Of course, I also wish to convince historians that it is worth conceptualizing the economy in the ways outlined here. In the chapters, I flesh out this concept and put it to work by constructing historical narratives informed by it. Finally, while I believe this effort can help sharpen capitalism as a category of analysis, for it to succeed the theorization of the economy must be more generally valuable, beyond capitalism—including for understanding what kind of economy existed before capitalism, and what it would mean for an economy to come after it.