by Sheri Berman
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Product Description
Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 buyer beware, 2007-06-12
I picked up this book expecting to find a comprehensive history of 20th century social democracy. But it turns out the book is an intellectual history of social democratic thought in Italy, France and Germany in the 19th century through the 1930s, with a lot of detailed discussion of pretty obscure thinkers and party congresses. It may be fascinating for historians but not for political scientists. It does not really dig into political economy or political sociology, has no data on the size of workers' parties, labor unions etc in these countries. The main problem is that it peters out just when the story gets interesting - with the construction of a social democratic Europe after 1945.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 nylawyergirl, 2006-10-19
Sheri Berman has written a brillant, sweeping historical review of European Politics. She offers original insights into the development of the modern global economy. Destined to become a classic in its field, this book should be mandatory reading for political historians everywhere.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
A must for anybody interested in political economy, 2006-09-06
Berman argues that most of what we think about twentieth century politics is just wrong. Instead of seeing the chief ideological battle as one between democrats and totalitarians, or between capitalists and communists, she argues that the real struggle--or, better put, a crucial yet forgotten struggle--was about how to make capitalism and democracy mutually compatible.
Free markets don't only bring growth, she points out, but also bring instability, social dislocation, and other problems--problems that mass publics demand be solved. Older ideologies like classical liberalism or orthodox Marxism were unwilling to interfere with market operations, and so they got discredited when capitalism generated crises like the Great Depression. This paved the way for a battle between newer, more activist ideologies like fascism and social democracy, which were prepared to intervene in free markets as necessary to protect what they saw as society's interests. When fascism was defeated in WWII, social democracy was left standing as the only healthy and politically viable response to the problems of modern political economy.
Her argument is basically that "we're all social democrats now," even if we don't know it or acknowledge it, because pretty much everybody accepts the idea of combining some form of market-based economy with substantial government intervention to head off problems (the welfare state, countercyclical policies, etc. etc.). Yet only social democracy, she claims, has such an approach at its theoretical core, and so only social democrats really understand what they're doing and have a consistent approach to political economy.
She backs up this argument by tracing the debates over political economy in Europe from the late 19th century onward, showing how the earlier traditions foundered, how fascism and social democracy both emerged from revisionist Marxism, and how social democracy went from being an ideological outlier to being the core of the postwar settlement and contemporary policy. The book covers several countries over nearly a century of tumultuous history, but it's somehow beautifully written and very clear nevertheless.
Guaranteed to give American readers a new perspective on modern political economy, and explain to Europeans how they came to believe what they do. Highly recommended!
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