Gerassimos Moschonas, In The Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation, 1945 to the Present. London: Verso, 2002. 230 pp. $70.00 cloth; $22.00 paper.

Abstract

This book is one of the most important contributions to the history of the postwar European left to be published in the last two dozen years. The French educated Greek political scientist furnishes a study that is truly groundbreaking. For, by analyzing the most recent major paradigm shift occurring within European social democracy, Moschonas provides an explanation for what many readers of International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH) have felt and experienced for quite some time, i.e. the fact that “today's social democracy has opted not simply for another strategy, but for another identity” (232). “Social democracy has ceased to be an effective force for even the moderate promotion of equality and working-class influence, particularly trade-union influence” (291). Or, more precisely yet: “Social democracy has (. . .) been transformed from a political force for the moderate promotion of equality within a socio-economic system that is by definition inegalitarian, into a force for the moderate promotion of inequality in the face of forces that are even more inegalitarian” (293). In sum, European social democracy has become part and parcel of the neoliberal “consensus.”