Taking Stock of a Century of Socialism

Abstract

Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism' reads like a classic in the sense of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Sassoon does not dispose of his central character in front of a train, but what happens to European socialism is something rather similar, he thinks. European socialism tragically miscalculated and misunderstood until its enemies did it in. On Sassoon's evidence the socialist movement is today moribund. There is still a body left - contemporary social democracy - and it still breathes. But this is a case of mistaken identity: the body is an imposter. Sassoon's book is weighty in all ways, with 780 pages of text, 1000 with supporting materials. Its size is commensurate with the tasks it sets. Indeed it could have been even longer. Sassoon wants to review 100 years of socialist movements in fourteen different European settings - Northern European and Scandinavian social democrats (including Austria, but not Ireland) plus Latin movements, both socialist and communist. If this breadth does not give plenty for experts to critique, his relative disinterest in organizations and political institutions probably will. His signal virtue, however, is starting where a first class socialist scholar would start, with the political economy of socialism.