Good books on social democracy

[Antonio the Sixth]

As a self-identifying social democrat, I found the most astute and enlightening analysis on the nature and impact of this political and ideological movement in Gösta Esping-Andersen's Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton University Press, 1985). It's a bit old, but that's also what makes it interesting - because we can see how much the realm of possibility for left-wing policies has narrowed over the course of a decade.

Other excellent books I've read on the topic include:
- Berman, S. (1998) The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Berman, S. (2006) The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Castles, F. (1978) The Social Democratic Image of Society. London: Routledge.
- Hicks, A. (1999) Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism: A Century of Income Security Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Tilton, T. (1990) The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy. New York: Oxford Univerisy Press.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As a self-identifying social democrat, I found the most astute and enlightening analysis on the nature and impact of this political and ideological movement in Gösta Esping-Andersen's Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton University Press, 1985). It's a bit old, but that's also what makes it interesting - because we can see how much the realm of possibility for left-wing policies has narrowed over the course of a decade.

You mean three decades?

There is also the interesting question how many of those limits are self imposed and how many dictated by changes in the global economy and general globalization.

Even as early 1995, I believe the policies that Esping-Andersen advocated would have sounded utterly outlandish to the entire political class. The Third Way was already in the making at that point.

And I think Esping-Andersen would argue that this ideological shift is the result of the Social Democratic parties' inability to seize the last occasions they had to implement an agenda for economic democracy. Once these occasions were gone, Social Democratic decomposition among the working class and the hegemony of neoliberal thought among the middle classes became too pronounced for such agenda to be politically viable.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm sorry, I should have clarified that earlier, bu Politics Against Markets only deals with Denmark, Norway and Sweden. These countries are taken as the quintessential "Social Democracies" and thus as the countries where it made more sense to explore the economic and social record of social democratic parties. It's obviously very difficult to translate these conclusions into countries where the left has barely if ever held power, like Italy pre-1994 or France pre-1981.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm sorry, I should have clarified that earlier, bu Politics Against Markets only deals with Denmark, Norway and Sweden. These countries are taken as the quintessential "Social Democracies" and thus as the countries where it made more sense to explore the economic and social record of social democratic parties. It's obviously very difficult to translate these conclusions into countries where the left has barely if ever held power, like Italy pre-1994 or France pre-1981.

Yeah I know, but that limits the power of his argument. SDs should have done X to achieve Y only matters if SDs could realistically have done X. Even in Scandinavia ED was a bit of a pipe dream. My reply also dealt with the faith of ED in Sweden and Denmark, where it proved impossible to implement it in Denmark and sustain even the watered down version of it in Sweden.

Do you mean impossible to sustain economically or politically? If the former, that's not an area I know enough about to be able to dispute it. In the latter case however, I can't help but believe that if the SAP really wanted it, they could have achieved it. They won the battle over pension reform in 1957-59 at a time where their political position was far less strong.

And Esping-Andersen would agree that there was no condition in Denmark for the implementation of ED. He argues that the Danish Social-Democrats jeopardized their future much earlier, in the 1950s and 60s, by enacting market-based housing policies that divided their base between renters and homeowners.