What happened to socialism and does it matter?

Abstract

sense of creating mass parties, with opportunities to govern, in the other major industrial societies and English-speaking democracies. (Since I am discussing this book in the context of a discussion of Lipset's involvement with this problem through his entire professional life, I hope Gary Marks will forgive me if I use the shorthand referring to the book as Lipset's, with the understanding that of course Marks is a full co-author. There is no indica tion in the book how the responsibility, for research and writing, was divided.) The book conveniently lists all of Lipset's other books, and we can see that from the beginning the failure of socialism has been a central issue, perhaps the central issue, in his intellectual life. Thus his first book, Agrarian Socialism, asks, how come a socialist government was able to take power in a Canadian province?and by direct implication, how come no socialist party has ever won election to head an American state? (Socialists did govern for a time a few American cities.) His second book, Union Democracy, with Martin Trow and James Coleman, took up a central theme in the problem of the failure of socialism?the difficulty of maintaining democracy in socialist parties and unions against the power of bureaucracy, a theme first raised by Robert Michels. This is an issue that troubled many young socialists of Lipset's generation. And his third, with Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, took up one major thesis in the attempt to explain the failure of socialism in the United States: the argument that because of the greater opportunities for individual social mobility available in the United States, socialism?with its promise of raising the position of the entire working class?had less appeal in the United States than in other industrial democracies. The comparison with Canada that was initiated in the study of the relative success of socialism in Canada has been pursued in other articles and books, most recently Continental Divide and Distinctive Cultures: Canada and the United States. A major theme in these books