American Socialism

Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism, edited by John M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday. 754 pp.

As I read this collection of articles, both new and familiar, my reactions were generally ambivalent. At some points I loathed the book enough to write: “If you attempt to mate a rabbit and mule, you do not get a hybrid animal of average fertility. This collaborative effort seems to have had a simil...