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Time for Another Reinvention

Socialist parties emerged as dynamic, powerful forces at the turn of the twentieth century. After decades of decline, can they revive themselves in the twenty-first?

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis speaks at the Brookings Institution. (Steve Purcell / Flickr)

Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism
by Stephanie L. Mudge
Harvard University Press, 2018, 524 pp.

To understand the obstacles facing the left today, we can start with Yanis Varoufakis’s ill-starred turn as Greece’s Finance Minister. Varoufakis came to office with one overriding ambition: to free Greece from the austerity regime imposed by the European Community and the International Monetary Fund. His argument was straightforward. Greece needed substantial relief from a debt burden that could not possibly be repaid, and austerity made a return to economic growth impossible.

Varoufakis used traditional Keynesian arguments to offer his European interlocutors a win-win solution that would make possible renewed growth in Greece and eventual repayment of Greece’s pared-down foreign debt. Europe’s leaders would have none of it. Even social democratic ministers turned away, praising him for his cleverness, then joining with their more conservative counterparts to force neoliberal solutions on Greece. How did Keynesianism become utopian? How did social democrats learn to speak the language of neoliberalism? How, in short, did we get here?

These are the questions that Stephanie Mudge (a colleague of mine at U.C. Davis) seeks to answer in her challenging new book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Mudge transverses more than a century of European socialism to offer a persuasive and powerful explanation for the rise of what she terms “neoliberalized leftism” in both Europe and the United States. Along the way, she lays down a series of markers for other academics. First, she is working to revive serious analyses of political parties, treating them not simply as puppets in the hands of activists and donors but as sites where experts and intellectuals build coalitions that shape policy outcomes. It is imperative to look at who has been recruited by these parties to write the party platforms and formulate their economic programs. Second, she is trying to build a bridge between the social sciences and history by making individual biographies central to her narrative. She is here reacting against the bias towards structural analysis in sociology and political science, where all too often a focus on institutions renders individual people invisible.

The result is the kind of big book that has become increasingly rare in these times of tightly focused academic monographs. Drawing from history, sociology, political science, and political economy, Mudge has produced an account that transforms our understanding of how European and American left parties changed over the twentieth century and raises important questions about how the left must reinvent itself in the twenty-first.