Fall 2023

Those who discuss socialism confront two distinct but not incompatible strategies: the essentialist and the historical. The former, Weber-like, presents socialism as an ideal-type, deduced from the activities or ideas of those identified as socialists. Once the concept is constructed, …

By the late 1950s all West European socialist and social democratic parties (I shall use the terms interchangeably) had abandoned in practice, and some in theory too, the idea of socialism as an “end-state” or “final goal.” What had been …