One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century

摘要

Books like this are a reviewer's nightmare. How to do justice to a tome that weighs in at 965 pages in roughly 1,000 words? The book in question is an updated version of its initial edition, which was published in 1995 and covered the story of socialism from 1880-1980. In the preface to the new edition, Sassoon notes that in 1996 'few questioned the view that Communism was dead, but many could expect that socialism, in its modern form of social democracy, still had a lease of life' (p. xi). He concludes said preface though, by gloomily noting that the parties of the Left 'have been forced on the defensive and they have few new ideas to propose' (p. xxii).