The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation is a good title for a book - there are, in fact, no fewer than 3 books which bear the title of “The Great Transformation” – the first by Bessant (in 2021 subtitled History for a Techno-Human Future), the second by Karen Armstrong in 2006 (subtitled The Beginning of our (religious) traditions ) and the final by Karel Polyani – written in 1944 and subtitled The political and economic origins of our time). Four if you include Milanovic who add “Great” to his title of 2025 - The Great Global Transformation Branko Milanovic 

My recent reading

Generation Left Keir Milburn 2019 68pp
American Fascists – the American Right and the war on America Chris Hedges (2006) 

to which I was brought by this post
The Problem of Pain CS Lewis (1947)
Labour in Contemporary Capitalism – what next? Ursula Huws (2019) looks excellent. 

I particularly liked the way her Introduction summarises the texts produced in the 

last few decades. More authors should be doing this
The Death of Distance Francis Cairncross (1997) One of the early books about the great 

transformation
The Coming Storm – power, conflict and warnings from history Odd Westad (2026)

We are entering a phase where multiple Great Powers jostle for supremacy within regions 

and within human endeavors such as nuclear technology, artificial intelligence, or space 

exploration. Trade, which was becoming freer for two generations, almost back to where it 

was before World War I started, is increasingly more restricted and fragile, and trade wars 

are breaking out among major powers. This world is unlike anything any of us have 

experienced in our lifetimes. But it does look quite a bit like the world of more than a 

hundred years ago, from the late nineteenth century to 1914. Back then we also had a 

world of many Great Powers that clashed with one another and sought to dominate their 

neighborhoods. Nationalism and populism were on the rise, and many people felt that the 

globalization of the day had not worked for them.

The Moon is Down John Steinbeck (1942)
Anarchists Never Surrender – essays, polemics and other correspondence on Anarchism 

ed Victor Serge and Mitchell Abador (2015)
Concept of the Mind Gilbert Ryle (1957)
Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science Natasha Piano (2025)

My alternative narrative questions whether we should continue to identify modern democracy as synonymous with free and fair elections. Reviving the Italian School’s original contributions unearths a theory of democracy that might help us disassociate these two concepts in our political vocabulary. The point of this endeavor is not to eliminate elections from democratic theory.

Rather, I maintain, deflating the democratic expectations of electoral politics can help restore the legitimacy of elections and actually revive their proper role in modern popular government.

Today, when the future of contemporary democracies appears murky, the definition of democracy as free and fair elections no longer maintains the clarity that it once promised. Retracing the genealogy of democratic elitism might not only purge us of old bad habits; it might also lead us to a fresh conception of modern democracy following the Italian tradition of buon governo—democracy as part and parcel of good government.

Elites and Democracy Hugo Drochon (2026)

What’s Left? How the Left Lost its Way Nick Cohen (2007)

The Web of Meaning Jeremy Lent 2021 An important book to which I need to dedicate some patience

The Great Global Transformation Branko Milanovic 2025 199 pages
After Nations Rana Dasgupta (2026)
The Lomborg Deception – setting the record straight about global warming Howard Friel (2010)
The Language of Climate Politics, fossil-fuel propoganda and how to fight it 

G Guenther (2024)

This propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of 

climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and 

resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this:

“Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist—and anyway phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.”

On The Calculation of Volume – vol 1 Solvej Balle (2024) a novel
China’s Twentieth Century Wang Hui (2016)
Capital Rules – the construction of Global Finance  R Abdelal (2007)
Lies, Spies and Exile – the extraordinary story of the Russian Spie, Robert Blake Simon Kupar (2021)
The Writer and the Traitor Robert Verkaik (2026)
Irregular Army -how the war on terror brought neo-nazis, gang members and criminals 

 

into the US military  Matt Kennard (2012)

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in front of the assembled great and good of the Pentagon and delivered an expansive lecture entitled Bureaucracy to Battlefield.2 Its prescriptions were extremely radical—among the most portentous in US military history —but thanks to the terrorist atrocities the following day his words remain buried deep in the memory hole, while their consequences are buried under the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld began, before revealing the threat to be not Al-Qaeda, but the “Pentagon bureaucracy.” “Not the people, but the processes,” he added reassuringly. “Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.” In essence, Rumsfeld’s speech that day was designed to lay the ground and soften up his workers for a massive privatization of the Department of Defense’s services.

The Long 1989 – decades of global revolution ed Kockiki and Kal (2019)

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe Ralf Dahrendorf (1990)
Reflections on the Revolution of our time Harold Laski (1947)
Episode of Maigret with Rowan Atkinson
Toynbee’s A Study of History ed Somervell (1947)
Artful Truths – the philosophy of memoir Helena de Bres (2021)
The Great Awakening – new modes of life amongst capitalist ruins ed A Grear and 

D Bollier (2020)
Radical Republicanism – recovering the traditions of popular heritage ed Stuart White 

et al (2020)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?  Film with Spencer Tracey
Dismantling Solidarity – Capitalist politics and American pensions since the new 

deal Michael McCarthy (2017)
War and Power – who wins wars and why Philips O’Brien (2025)

JUST A TYPICAL DAY

I wanted to share the reading I do each day – before 3.30pm. So let me tell you 

that this Sunday these are the (various blogposter links eg this here) – a strange 

mix of right-wing tracts and left-wing writing

Taboo – how making race a sacred cow produced a cultural revolution Eric Kaufmann 
(2024)
Bad Education – why our universities are broken and how we can fix them Matt Goodwin 
(2025) reviewed here
World History – a new perspective Clive Ponting (2000)
Thirteen Days – the countdown to the Great War Clive Ponting (2003)
1940 – myth and reality Clive Ponting (1990)
From What Is to What If Rob Hopkins (2019)
Society Against the State - essays in political anthropology Pierre Clastres (1989)
Waiting for Yesterday – pages from a street kid’s life Michael Parenti (2013)
Attenuated Democracy – a critical intro to US government and politics  David Hubert 
(2020)
History as Mystery Michael Parenti (1999)
Power and the Powerless Michael Parenti (1989)
Hemingway documentary 
Underground Empire – how America weaponised the world economy 
Henry Farrell and Abe Newman (2023)

FINAL POST ON LEFTISM

There have, apparently, been posts about 30 books on the leftist theme in my recent writing – of which several are my favourites eg 

• Searching for Socialism – the project of the labour new left from Benn to 

Corbyn Leo Panitch and Colin Hay (2020) 

Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party.

Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.

• This Is Only The Beginning – the making of a new left from anti-austerity to 

the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022).

• Alternative Societies for a Pluralist Socialism Luke Martell (2023)

Today I have 3 Beyond Social Democracy – the transformation of the left in 

emerging knowledge societies ed S Hausermann and H Kitschelt (2024)

The slow and intermittent electoral erosion of Social Democracy in the late twentieth century has accelerated over the past two decades across much of Europe. Almost none of the European social democratic parties has managed to defy the maelstrom of electoral decline. By the 2020s, most center-left parties carrying the social democratic, socialist, or labor label have become shadows of their former selves in terms of aggregate vote shares, members, activists, legislators, and government cabinet members. Scholars have offered many explanations for Social Democracy’s misfortunes.

No single hypothesis may be sufficient to account for this development exhaustively. Some of the explanations have a nostalgic flavor, arguing that social democratic parties have changed “too much” over the past decades, reneging on their established policy promises and thereby abandoning the needs of an erstwhile loyal electoral constituency. Other explanations posit that social democratic parties have changed “not enough,” failing to adapt to transformed voter potentials and to develop creative responses to novel societal and political-economic challenges that require Social Democrats to reimagine ways to advance social equality and universalism in society.

The first perspective – Social Democracy having changed “too much” – draws empirical support from some undeniable facts, such as the declining propensity to support Social Democracy among the parties’ traditional core constituencies, particularly blue-collar workers. However, the various empirical analyses in the chapters of this volume suggest that the overwhelming balance of evidence points toward Social Democrats not having adapted enough to changing substantive policy challenges, changing programmatic dynamics, and changing electoral landscapes.

Social democratic parties encounter massive difficulties in reimagining their programmatic electoral appeal to stem electoral decline. These difficulties, however, are not simply the consequence of strategic mistakes or myopia. Rather, both structural political-economic change and strategic party calculations make it virtually impossible to capture as encompassing an electoral constituency as many social democratic parties did in the period of post–World War II (WWII) economic prosperity growth in the West. Society has been profoundly transformed both socially and economically; it has become pluralized and more fragmented, and so have programmatic electoral competition and party systems.

In this more scattered and fragmented political space, ripe with political divides over programmatic positions and priorities, social democratic parties can nowhere extricate themselves from their current electoral predicaments. However, their fortunes vary with how they have coped over time with these new competitive situations. Most importantly, they are no longer the only and sometimes not even the largest parties in a “left field” of competitors – all of which embrace fundamental “social democratic values” but articulate them through different policies and by appealing to constituencies absent in the traditional social democratic electoral coalition.

Andrew Murray is a trade union activist with a strange aristocratic pedigree 

and author of The Fall and Rise of the British Left (2019)

While much of this book focuses on the fortunes of the Labour Party over the last fifty years, the Party itself is not necessarily coterminous with the British left. The latter includes all those who politically advocate for a shift to a socialist system of society, a grouping that overlaps considerably with the labour movement. In contrast, the Labour Party has always included an element (usually dominant) not interested in socialism at all, while the left has embraced movements, campaigns, initiatives and parties standing outside the Party.

Today, the left and the Labour Party are more closely entwined than at any point in history. This has been the outcome of the left’s own struggles against a rising and then declining neoliberalism since the 1970s. It is represented by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, although it did not start there and won’t end there either. As a result, this is not another book about the rise of Corbyn. It is about a movement and the ideas underpinning it, which cannot be reduced to any one individual and will outlast any particular leadership and any foreseeable electoral outcomes.Chapters 1 through to 8 are more or less chronological, telling the fall–rise and rise–fall stories together, perhaps informing younger activists how we got here and what debates there were along the way. The two concluding chapters break with the chronology. In essence they seek to answer the question posed by a colleague who read an early draft of this book – ‘How do we win?’ – by which she meant how do we get from here to socialism.

None of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more, although neither 1917 nor 1945 seemed so in prior contemplation. In that spirit, we cross the river a stone at a time. The other bank is there, even if only dimly perceived, the present side no longer habitable. So what’s next? In many countries across Europe and North America, only two choices present themselves – a reconstituted centrism flogging the dead horse of the old dispensation, or a nationalist authoritarianism trading on populist sloganizing. These two live in a symbiotic relationship, sharing far more than either likes to admit. When push comes to shove, liberalism defends property and market rights first of all. If the liberals wanted to stop the rise of the authoritarians, one contribution to that cause might have been the jailing of a few bankers.

Instead, they were rewarded with a super-fast return to business – and bonuses – as usual. The parties and politicians of the left, like Hollande and Obama, who campaigned offering a different approach but ended up abandoning many of their pledges and conforming to the Wall Street–City–Brussels consensus instead, did more than anyone to inculcate a cynicism towards democratic politics and open the door to the nastiest elements of the right wing. The leaders of the authoritarian nationalists’ pseudo-alternative, for their part, treasure most of the system they rail against. Theirs is a rebellion against powerlessness organized by the powerful. Authoritarian populism is neoliberalism’s ugly enabler, not its principled opponent – a ‘populism’ which seeks to entrench gross inequality, strengthen every institution of class power, and preserve the basic institutions of economic liberalism while indulging freely in racism and xenophobia. The main purpose of the lurid Donald Trump is to make the rich still richer (himself definitely included). Indeed, the shift to authoritarianism represented by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro mostly reflects the difficulty in extending neoliberalism by democratic means at a time of its rampant

unpopularity. This is not how history ends. Conjuring the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin warn that ‘the persistence of neoliberalism alongside hyper-nationalism through the crisis increasingly poses the question of “socialism vs barbarism redux”’.2 Barbarism redux is evidently on the menu, synthesizing elite neoliberalism with authoritarian identity politics – backing the bankers while banning the burka. Behind Boris Johnson, still worse may lurk.

The final book is Our Bloc – how we win James Schneider (2022). 

The Guardian reviewed the book and had this to say -

James Schneider was a co-founder of Momentum, the political movement formed off the 

back of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, and was later the party’s head of 

strategic communications.
In his new book, he takes a different approach. Opening boldly and promisingly, his first 

words are “defeatism plagues the British left”, and his introduction sketches his ambition: 

“To keep the possibilities open and turn winning from a distant hope into a reality, we 

must use the coming years to build power, weaken our opponents, and prepare ourselves 

for the next surge.” At just over 100 pages it is more of a pamphlet and the footnotes are 

vital, linking to books, blogs and articles, and pointing the reader towards a wide range of 

debates. The intellectual parenthood of the book is obvious – the political theorist 

Chantal Mouffe, and in particular her For a Left Populism, Antonio Gramsci’s Modern 

Prince in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, and the work of Stuart Hall. 

Such influences set severe standards, though, and Schneider fails to meet them.  
The intellectual energy that powered the rise of Corbyn was real, and it puts Labour party 

moderates to shame that the centrist intellectual touchstone Anthony Crosland’s 

The Future of Socialism is nearly 70 years old. Yes, the Labour manifesto was soundly 

rejected by voters in 2019, but it was enthusiastically endorsed by the same electorate in 2017. 

The UK left has to internalise the fact that both general elections were equally 

consequential: currently moderates focus on the landslide in 2019, and the left celebrate 

successfully destroying a Tory majority in 2017. Both sides are right – and both sides 

need each other. 

AN UPDATE ON JOURNALS WORTH READING

Almost ten years ago. I posted about intellectual journals worth reading. As a Xmas bonus I thought it useful to repost it (with a few titles deleted since they no longer operate). I started with a question about which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked. This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 

It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular”. From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a leftist E-mag which I have grown to appreciate – one of the few to which I subscribe

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian. It makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts. Not one I now follow
Los Angeles Review of Books; relatively new journal whose writing occasionally grates 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE great UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Also one to which I subscribe 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists

The Marginalian; an interesting cultural journal which I no longer follow – being a bit too predictable  

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Yorker; impressive US writing which I’ve been tempted to subscribe to
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics  and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere.

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope. But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.