In the Name of Social Democracy

Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution social democracy was the great victor at the <i>fin-de-siècle</i> elections. Today parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic “modernisation” of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas’s study is the emergent “new social democracy” of the twenty-first century. As Moschonas demonstrates change has been a constant of social-democratic history: the core dominant reformist tendency of working-class politic notwithstanding capitalism has transformed social democracy more than it has succeeded in transforming capitalism. Now in the “great transformation” of recent years a process of “de-social-democratization” has been set in train affecting every aspect of the social-democratic phenomenon from ideology and programs to organization and electorates. Analytically incisive and empirically meticulous <i>In the Name of Social Democracy</i> will establish itself as the standard reference work on the logic and dynamics of a major mutation in European politics.