FOUR MORE FASCINATING BOOKS TO WHET YOUR APPETITE

 Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics ed G Munck and R Snyder 

(2007) A brilliant book which focuses on the writings of a range of work from 
people such as Almond, Barrington Moore, Lipjart, Skocpol and Linz

Understanding Socialism Richard Wolff (2019) A short (145 pp) book which 
superbly demonstrates the power of the concept

Introduction

Chapter I A Brief History: How Socialism Got to its Here and Now p9

Chapter 2 What ls Socialism? p27

Chapter 3 Capitalism and Socialism: Struggles and Transitions p41

Chapter 4 Russia and China: Major Experiments in Constructing Socialism p55

Chapter 5 Two Anti-socialist Purges: Fascism and Anti-communism p87

Chapter 6 Socialism's Future and Worker Co-ops p109

ln this book's lntroduction we referred to socialism as a yearning for something better than capitalism. As capitalism has changed and as experiments with socialism have accumulated - both good and bad - socialist yearnings, too, have changed. However, a bizarre disconnect surfaces as capitalism's gross dysfunction during and since its 2008 crash brings socialism again into public discussion. Large numbers of people debate the pros and cons of socialism as if what it is in the 21st century were identical to what it was in the 20tn. ls it reasonable to presume that the last century's two purges, the Cold War, the implosion of the USSR, and the explosive emergence of the People's Republic of China inspired no critical reflections on socialism by socialists themselves? No. The remarkable lack of awareness of new and different definitions of socialism since 1945, their elaborations, and their implications reflects the fact that sustained engagement with socialism was taboo in the US for decades. That people are now mostly unaware of socialism's evolution in theory, practice, and self-criticism over the last half century is therefore no surprise. The taboo against socialism resulted in a mass retreat from engaging with developments in socialism and connecting these developments to the problems of modern capitalism. Socialism rather became one of two things in the minds of most. On the one hand, many politicians, academics, and media pundits portrayed socialism as coinciding with Soviet efforts to subvert global capitalism. Socialism for such people meant moving from private to state-owned and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products. These same people equated opposing capitalism with opposing democracy and freedom. This equation was then repeated endlessly in an effort to make it "common sense." On the other hand, socialism was the name adopted by Western European - and especially Scandinavian – "welfarestate" governments, which aimed to regulate markets comprised still mostly of private capitalist firms. This led many people to associate socialism with robust public spending and government intervention in the marketplace. Consequently, socialism was viewed as more or less extreme, depending on whether it involved state-owned and -operated firms with centrat planning at one end or merely welfare-state policies with market regulation on the other.

Ch 7 Conclusion p127

Global Statesman – how Gordon Brown took New Labour to the world David 
Webber (2017)

Placing increased emphasis upon ‘competition, supervision and the right conditions for growth’, Brown knelt at the altar of the market as the only means through which poverty and underdevelopment might be addressed. Under Brown’s close watch, many of New Labour’s international development policies adopted precisely the self-same neoliberal doctrine preached by the ‘post-Washington Consensus’. This revised orthodoxy, still based upon the principles of free trade and private investment that lay at the heart of the original Washington Consensus, now required national governments to put in place a much more robust and transparent regulatory framework.

This ostensibly new set of political and economic reforms would promote both stability – so as to reduce the exposure of countries to the financial crises that had, since the start of the 1970s, punctured the global economy – and growth. If investors could be made to feel more confi dent that their capital would be ‘safe’ in a particular country, they would be more likely to scale up their investment and contribute more towards the economic growth of that country and, concomitantly, its development. Crucially, insofar as Gordon Brown was concerned, although an anti-poverty agenda provided the pretext for his appeal for a ‘new economic architecture’ (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5), it was, in reality, his own general growth theory that informed this framework.

The Global Casino – how Wall Street gambles with people and the planet Ann 
Pettifor (2026)

President Roosevelt was explicit about these enemies of democracy. In a famous speech in Madison Square Garden in 1936, he explained that his administration had to ‘struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ‘They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We now know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.’

Government by organised money has become unbearable for human society. Financial markets that dictate high prices of unaffordable services essential to humanity – services like water, housing, energy, health and education – have triggered powerful political reactions. Society has turned to strongmen, dictators and authoritarians for ‘protection’ from markets. The reasoning, as Karl Polanyi explained in 1944, is straightforward: government by markets could not exist for long before ‘annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man [sic] and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness’. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, he continued. But whatever measures it took – for example, the election of Donald Trump, who promised protection from Chinese and Mexican markets – impaired those markets, disorganised industrial life and endangered society in other ways.

If society is to restore stability to the economic system, to manage climate breakdown and the power of the fossil interest, then we must first transform, regulate and manage the Global Casino. Only then can we hope to build a fairer and more stable world order. 

What Is to Be Done?

This book is about seeing, and paying attention to, the international financial and monetary system and its role in accelerating the exploitation of people and the extraction of the earth’s precious finite assets. We must base our comprehension and understanding on this simple reality: the globalised financial system is man-made and designed to be remote and unaccountable. Its design is intentional. The ultimate hidden truth of the world, David Graeber wrote, is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. Like the divine right of kings, it is a system that can and will be transformed. How can we change a system that economists systematically ignore, one whose governors are determined to evade public accountability? First there must be widespread understanding of the international financial system and of the fact it is designed and governed to serve the interests of the wealthy –the 1 per cent. Only with that understanding will we be able to organise, to once again redesign the system to serve all of society and the ecosystem.

We know that can be done because it has been transformed before, in the blink of an eye. The system was redesigned, reregulated and even transformed both before and after the Second World War. And again in 1971 when President Nixon unilaterally, and virtually overnight, dismantled the global Bretton Woods system and launched what came to be known as ‘globalisation’. Another catastrophic global war would inevitably lead to radical change. But we need not accept that inevitability. I believe that with wider understanding, political will and radical action, the system can be transformed and remade. This book is mainly concerned with the first aim, throwing light on the invisible, globalised financial system, its evolution over the past century and its powerful masters. I then outline the impact of the financial system on pensions, food, energy and housing, as well as on the climate. Finally drawing on the wisdom of economists and historians, I propose ways in which the international financial system can be transformed and made subordinate to the interests of society and the ecosystem. Scientists and the UN have warned that if human civilisation is to survive, we must cut greenhouse gas emissions and restore stability to the global climate system. Such a worthy aim is futile and delusional until we, the people, take back control, taming and subordinating the money system to serve the interests of both the biosphere and humanity, not just, as at present, the interests of wealth. 

INTERESTING TIMES

Such is the title of Eric Hobsbawm's fascinating autobiography 

Interesting Times – a 20th century life Eric Hobsbawm 2002

That is what an autobiography can do. In one sense this book is the flip

side of The Age of Extremes: not world history illustrated by the

experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or

rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to

adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make

[them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances

chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given

and transmitted from the past’ and, one might add, by the world around

them.

In another sense the autobiography of a historian is an important part of the construction of his or her work. Next to a belief in reason and the difference between fact and fiction, self-awareness, that is to say standing both in one’s body and outside it, is a necessary skill for players of the game in both history and the social sciences, particularly for a historian who, like myself, has chosen his subjects intuitively and accidentally, but ended by bringing them together into a coherent whole. Other historians may pay attention to these more professional aspects of my book. However, I hope others will read it as an introduction to the most extraordinary century in the world’s history through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other.

History, as my colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller put it, ‘is about what happens seen from outside, memoirs about what happens seen from within’. This is not a book for scholarly acknowledgements, but only for thanks and apologies. The thanks go above all to my wife Marlene who has lived through half my life, read and criticized all chapters to good purpose and who tolerated the years when an often distracted, bad-tempered and sometimes discouraged husband lived less in the present than in a past he struggled to put on paper. I also thank Stuart Proffitt, a prince among editors. The number of people whom I have consulted over the years on questions relevant to this autobiography is too large for acknowledgement, even though several of them have died since I began. They know why I thank them.

My apologies also go to Marlene and the family. This is not the autobiography they might have preferred, for, though they are constantly present, at least from the moment when they entered my life and I theirs, this book is more about the public than the private man. I should also apologize to those friends, colleagues, students and others absent from these pages, who might have expected to find themselves remembered here, or recalled at greater length. Finally, I have organized the book in three parts. After a brief overture, the personal—political chapters 1—16, roughly in chronological order, cover the period from when memory begins — in the early 1920s — to the early 1990s. However, they are not intended as a straightforward chronicle. Chapters 17 and 18 are about my career as a professional historian. Chapters 19—22 are about countries or regions (other than my native Mitteleuropa and England) with which I have had associations for long periods of my life: France, Spain and Italy, Latin America and other parts of the Third World and the USA. Since they cover the entire range of my dealings with these countries, they do not fit easily into the main chronological narrative, though they overlap with it. I have therefore thought it best to keep them separate.

Eric Hobsbawm

London, April 2002

The Age of Hobsbawm Emil Chabal (2026) For those who don’t want to read 
Richard Evan’s Eric Hobsbawm – a life in history (2019) 

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.