Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in science. Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to the New Man inspired more searching for the path to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third World socialism. None worked, and some exacted a staggering human toll. Then, after two centuries of wishful thinking and fitful governance,...

Utopian dreamers are deceived and deceiving. Their "fight for the people" rhetoric may sound good at first, but history proves egalitarian governments create poverty and misery. Utopians believe that through their own personal brilliance a better society can be created on earth. When the belief in man as a creation in the image of God is completely rejected, the use of slavery and mass execution can be justified in the name of the creation of a utopian...

What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentators have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left...

Published more than twenty years ago, Stephen Eric Bronner's bold defense of socialismremains one of the best texts to reframe the movement for modern audiences. Treatingsocialism as an ethic and reclaiming its early intellectual foundations, while acknowledging and correcting its inherent flaws, Bronner advances a more robust theory of working-class politics for the twenty-first century. Unfolding chronologically, Bronner's study revisits the labor...

For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories...

"As a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty has documented the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Emmanuel Macron's ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always from the perspective of his fight for a more equitable world. This collection brings together those articles and is prefaced by an extended introductory essay, in which Piketty...

Richard Bessel, a history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by “a band of political gangsters,” came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst...

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders, using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before nor since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings. Before the war crimes...

One of the outstanding religious philosophers of the century here provides an account of the growth of the Utopian ideal from the perspective of a critical exposition of Marxist theory and the practice of Lenin.