Preface
between the later 1970s and early 1990s Europe’s political landscape
was radically rearranged. The 1989 revolutions removed the Eastern
European socialist bloc, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Through an
equally drastic capitalist restructuring, Western Europe was transformed.
Whereas socialist parties recaptured government across Europe during the
later 1990s, moreover, these were no longer the same socialist parties as
before. Profoundly deradicalized, they were separating rapidly from the
political cultures and social histories that had sustained them during a previous
century of struggle. Communist parties, consistently the labor movements’
most militant wings, had almost entirely disappeared. No one talked
any longer of abolishing capitalism, of regulating its dysfunctions and excesses,
or even of modifying its most egregiously destructive social effects.
For a decade after 1989, the space for imagining alternatives narrowed to
virtually nothing.
But from another perspective new forces had been energizing the Left.
If labor movements rested on the proud and lasting achievements built from
the outcomes of the Second World War but now being dismantled, younger
generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radicalism,
countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s
political cultures into quite new directions. Partly these new energies flowed
through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political
space. Feminism was certainly the most important of these emergent movements,
forcing wholesale reappraisal of everything politics contained. But
radical ecology also arrived, linking grassroots activism, communitarian
experiment, and extraparliamentary mobilization in unexpected ways. By
1980, a remarkable transnational peace movement was getting off the
ground. A variety of alternative lifestyle movements captured many imaginations.
The first signs of a new and lasting political presence bringing
these developments together, Green parties, appeared on the scene.
In the writings of historians, sociologists and social theorists, cultural
critics, and political commentators of all kinds, as well as in the Left’s own
variegated discourse, an enormous challenge to accustomed assumptions
was generated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The crisis
of socialism during the 1980s not only compelled the rethinking of the
boundaries and meanings of the Left, the needs of democracy, and the very
nature of politics itself but also forced historians into taking the same questions
back to the past. Contemporary feminism’s lasting if unfinished
achievement, for example, has been to insist on the need to refashion our
viii preface
most basic understandings in the light of gender, the histories of sexuality,
and all the specificities of women’s societal place. More recently, inspired
partly by the much longer salience of such questions in the United States
and partly by practical explosions of racialized conflicts in the 1980s and
1990s, a similar examination of race and ethnicity has begun. Many other
facets of identity joined a growing profusion of invigorating political debates.
In the process, the earlier centrality of class, as both social history
and political category, dissolved. While class remained an unavoidable reality
of social and political action for the Left in the twenty-first century,
the earlier centering of politics around the traditional imagery of the male
worker in industry had to be systematically rethought.
Conceived in one era, therefore, this book was completed in another. I
began writing in a Europe of labor movements and socialist parties, of
strong public sectors and viable welfare states, and of class-centered politics
and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was
flawed and the Soviet example was by then damaged almost beyond recall,
Communist parties in the West remained carriers of a distinctive militancy.
In the public sphere, rhetorics of revolution, class consciousness, and socialist
transformation still claimed a place. With Socialists riding the democratic
transitions triumphantly to power in Spain, Portugal, and Greece,
Polish Solidarnosc tearing open the cobwebbed political cultures of Eastern
Europe, and French Socialists forming their first postwar government,
things seemed on the move. The years 1979–81 were for socialists an encouraging
and even an inspiring time.
This gap between optimism and its ending, between the organized
strengths of an already formed tradition and the emergent potentials for its
succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’ve written it to capture
the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition. To do so required
both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the
present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old
remain vital to the shaping of the new. Although the century after the 1860s
claims the larger share of the book, accordingly, the lines of the later
twentieth-century argument are always inscribed earlier on. In that sense,
I would argue, history can both impede the present and set it free. Moreover,
beginning in the 1860s, my account moves forward through a series
of pan-European revolutionary conjunctures, from the settlements accompanying
the two world wars through the dramas of 1968 to the latest
restructuring of 1989–92.
Ultimately, despite the endless complexities of detailed historiographical
debate, the agonies of epistemology, and the excitements and frustrations
of theory, historians can never escape the discipline’s abiding conundrum
of continuity and change. In some periods and circumstances, the given
relationships, socially and politically, seem inert and fixed. Culture signifies
the predictable and overpowering reproduction of what “is.” It claims the
verities of tradition and authorizes familiar futures from the repetitions of
a naturalized past (“what has always been the case”). Politics becomes the
machinery of maintenance and routine. The image of a different future
becomes displaced into fantasy and easily dismissed. The cracks and fissures
are hard to find.
But at other times things fall apart. The given ways no longer persuade.
The present loosens its grip. Horizons shift. History speeds up. It becomes
possible to see the fragments and outlines of a different way. People shake
off their uncertainties and hesitations; they throw aside their fears. Very
occasionally, usually in the midst of a wider societal crisis, the apparently
unbudgeable structures of normal political life become shaken. The expectations
of a slow and unfolding habitual future get unlocked. Still more
occasionally, collective agency materializes, sometimes explosively and with
violent results. When this happens, the formal institutional worlds of politics
in a nation or a city and the many mundane worlds of the private, the
personal, and the everyday move together. They occupy the same time. The
present begins to move. These are times of extraordinary possibility and
hope. New horizons shimmer. History’s continuum shatters.
When the revolutionary crisis recedes, little stays the same as before.
Historians argue endlessly over the balance—between contingency and
structure, process and event, agency and determination, between the exact
nature of the revolutionary rupture and the reach of the longer running
pasts. But both by the thoroughness of their destructive energy and by the
power of their imaginative release, revolutionary crises replenish the future.
The relationship of the lasting institutional changes to the revolutionaries’
willed desires will always be complex. William Morris famously expressed
this in A Dream of John Ball: “I . . . pondered how [people] fight and lose
the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their
defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other
[people] have to fight for what they meant under another name.”1 Since
the 1930s revolutionary sensibility has become ever more tragic in this way,
memorably captured in Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history,
with its back to the future, unable “to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed” and compelled instead to gaze “fixedly”
on the seamless catastrophe of the past, piling “wreckage upon wreckage”
at its feet. The angel is propelled into an unseeable future by an unstoppable
force, “a storm blowing from Paradise.” “This storm,” Benjamin reflects,
“is what we call progress.”2
Revolutions no longer receive a good press. The calamity of Stalinism
and the ignominious demise of the Soviet Union have been allowed to erase
almost entirely the Russian Revolution’s emancipatory effects. Stalinism’s
ferocities during the 1930s and 1940s did irremediable damage to Communism’s
ethical credibility, it should be immediately acknowledged, enabling
associative allegations against all other versions of socialist ideas.
Justified reminders of capitalism’s destructive and genocidal consequences
for the world, both inside Europe and without, can never dispose of those
histories, as fuller knowledge of Bolshevism’s post-1917 record is making
ever more clear. Nevertheless, for most of the twentieth century, it’s important
to note, the Left has more often stepped back from violent revolutionary
opportunities than embraced them. Moreover, an honest admission
of the dangers released by revolutionary uprisings needs to be balanced
by two further recognitions. First, there remains something uniquely inspiring
in the spectacle of masses of people in political motion, collectively
engaging the future. Second, as this book will argue, the most important
gains for democracy have only ever be attained through revolution, or at
least via those several concentrated periods of change I’ll call the great
constitution-making conjunctures of modern European history.
I’ve been privileged in my own lifetime to have experienced two of these
revolutionary moments—one successful, the other “failed”—while being
formed in my childhood by the extraordinary achievements of a third. The
1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe were the most recent of these experiences,
and their lasting democratic significance can be neither subsumed
nor discounted by the damage to those societies subsequently wrought by
marketization. An earlier revolutionary moment, that of 1968, was formative
for my own political adulthood as well as for the larger understanding
of the Left this book contains.
Finally, I was also formed in the protective and enabling culture of the
post-1945 political settlement. I was a child of the welfare state. I drank
its orange juice and received its vaccinations. I lived in its housing. I took
for granted its third-pint bottles of school milk delivered daily to my classroom.
I throve on its educational opportunities, while hating much of the
delivery. I knew about family allowances, the National Health Service, free
prescriptions, and the begrudging public respect accorded trade unions. I
cried, without quite understanding the reasons, when Nye Bevan died, and
I remember my mother’s disapproval of his hymnless funeral. I was told a
lot about the depression and somewhat less about the war, but I knew why
they mattered. I understood how profoundly they had affected my parents’
generation. Though I was not born until 1949, I remember the war very
clearly; it was all around me. I knew why it was fought.
This book is written from great passion and great regret. It has taken
me two long decades. Its writing was shaped and buffeted by a huge
amount of contemporary change. It has required a willingness to rethink
and surrender some valued assumptions and deeply cherished beliefs. Nonetheless,
even allowing for the narratives of knowingness and consistency
we like to construct for our intellectual biographies, the main lines of argument
remain in many ways consistent with my thinking in the mid-
1980s, though I’m sure I understand the implications far better now. It was
on one of my returns to England in the spring of 1984, reentering the
unique contemplative space of the railway journey (also a thing of the past)
and reeling from the brutalized public atmosphere surrounding the miners’
I can still weep for all the loss this entailed, for the wasted sacrifices
strike, that I knew the world had changed.
and poor decisions, for the unsung everyday heroism as well as the more
obvious courageous acts, for the crimes perpetrated in the name of virtue
as well as those committed against it, for the gaps between promise and
achievement, for the movements, communities, and cultures built painstakingly
across generations whose bases are now gone. From my vantage point
at the close of the twentieth century, there were many times when this
seemed a painful book to be writing. It required a lot of letting go.
However, it is decidedly not an epitaph or an exercise in nostalgia. It is
written from the conviction that history matters, particularly when some
vital stories get mistold. That struggle of memory against forgetting has
become something of a commonplace of contemporary writing, but is no
less empowering for that. During the 1990s new amnesias brought some
essential histories under erasure. The history of the Left has been the struggle
for democracy against systems of inequality that limit and distort, attack
and repress, and sometimes seek even to liquidate human potential altogether.
Moreover, this is a history certainly not completed. If my book
concentrates in its first three parts on the building of one kind of movement
for the conduct of that struggle, the class-centered politics of the socialist
tradition, then it seeks to hold that tradition’s omissions and foreshortenings
clearly in view. The book’s final part then outlines the potentials from
which a new politics of the Left can be made. In that sense, it looks to the
future.
At various times during the writing of this book I was supported at the
University of Michigan by the Richard Hudson Research Professorship in
History, Research Partnerships from the Horace H. Rackham School of
Graduate Studies and the Office of the Vice-President for Research, a Faculty
Fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities, and a Michigan Humanities
Award. In the summer of 1992, I held a Guest Fellowship at the
Max Planck Institute for History in Go¨ ttingen. Very early versions of some
chapters were typed by Jeanette Diuble, but the advent of word processing
certainly hasn’t removed the importance of first-class office support, and at
various times I’ve been hugly dependent on the generosity and skills of
Lorna Altstetter, Connie Hamlin, and Dawn Kapalla.
While still at Oxford University Press, Thomas LeBien gave me extraordinary
help in the editing stages of this manuscript, and his guiding hand
shaped the clarity and effectiveness of the final version. After his departure
for Princeton University Press, Susan Ferber saw this book through to completion.
Her editorial eye was keen and her guidance always surefooted and
astute. I’m grateful to have had the benefit of these two consummate editors
and of the anonymous readers’ reports they commissioned, and the book
reflects their input in numerous ways.
A book of this scale accumulates unmanageable debts. Mine begin with
my colleagues at the University of Michigan, who since 1979 have provided
an incomparably stimulating intellectual home. In the earliest stage I
learned a huge amount from Roman Szporluk, who first educated me properly
in the complexities of Eastern European history. Bill Rosenberg left his
mark on part II, especially my understanding of the First World War and
the Russian Revolution. My debt to Terry McDonald is as long as my
presence at Michigan, beginning with a reading group on class and social
history we ran in the early 1980s, the first of many settings where I’ve
benefited from his rigorous intellectual generosity. Bill Sewell’s presence was
invaluable in the later 1980s when approaches to working-class formation
were being so extensively rethought, and since the early 1990s so has been
that of Sonya Rose. Peggy Somers was equally important across many intellectual
fronts. Her head for theory constantly challenged me into clearing
my own. For my understanding of contemporary Eastern European politics
Mike Kennedy and Kim Scheppele were a wonderful resource. My grasp
of contemporary European politics more generally owes an equally large
debt to Andy Markovits.
It’s impossible to communicate with any brevity the high quality of intellectual
life in Ann Arbor, both in the History Department and in the
wider interdisiplinary sphere. For almost twenty years the affectionately
named Marxist Study Group has been giving me intellectual friendship and
ideas, and since 1987 so has the Program on the Comparative Study of
Social Transformations (CSST). These collective settings afforded my thinking
clarity and confidence. A full accounting of my debts would require
pages and pages, but among past and present colleagues I’d like especially
to thank the following: Julia Adams, Paul Anderson, Sara Blair, Charlie
Bright, Jane Burbank, David W. Cohen, Fred Cooper, Fernando Coronil,
Val Daniel, Nick Dirks, Susan Douglas, Jonathan Freedman, Kevin Gaines,
Janet Hart, Gabrielle Hecht, Julia Hell, June Howard, Nancy Hunt, Webb
Keane, Alaina Lemon, Marjorie Levinson, Rudolf Mrazek, Sherry Ortner,
Adela Pinch, Helmut Puff, Roger Rouse, David Scobey, Julius Scott, Rebecca
Scott, Julie Skurski, Scott Spector, George Steinmetz, Penny Von
Eschen, and Ernie Young.
Kathleen Canning has been my immediate colleague since the late
1980s. I’m not only a much better German historian in consequence but
also far more conversant with the challenges of gender history. The clarity
of the book’s argument regarding class formation and its understanding of
the importance of gender rely on the pioneering achievements of her work.
She is an unfailing source of excellent friendship, knowledge, and advice.
I’m equally privileged by having Kali Israel as my colleague and friend.
Without her my relationship to all things British would be immeasurably
the poorer. By her constant supply of information and small kindnesses, as
well as by the largeness of her intellectual vision and friendship, the quality
of this book has been hugely enhanced.
Many of my present and former students have helped with the book,
initially via research assistance and the exchange of ideas, but increasingly
through the excellence of their published work. I’m enormously indebted
to them all. They include Richard Bodek, Shiva Balaghi, Monica Burguera,
Becky Conekin, Belinda Davis, Todd Ettelson, Anne Gorsuch, Young-Sun
Hong, Rainer Horn, Jennifer Jenkins, Mia Lee, Kristin McGuire, Orlando
Martinez, David Mayfield, Amy Nelson, Mary O’Reilly, Kathy Pence, Alice
Ritscherle, Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Steve Soper, Julie Stubbs, Dennis Sweeney,
and Elizabeth Wood. They have also made Michigan into an extraordinary
place.
In the wider world the range of my indebtedness is equally great. In
many ways this book originated in conversations in Cambridge in the later
1970s at a time of far greater optimism than now, with a quality of intellectual
friendship that permanently grounded my thought. The following
will recognize their imprint not only in the book’s notes but also in the
architecture of its ideas: Jane Caplan, David Crew, Gareth Stedman Jones,
Paul McHugh, Stuart Macintyre, Susan Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft.
Over the book’s long life I’ve depended for bibliographical and interpretative
guidance on the generosity and wisdom of large numbers of colleagues
far and wide. More perhaps than they realize, their influence is
essential to my intellectual and political bearings. I’d especially like to thank
Ida Blom, Friedhelm Boll, Nancy Fraser, Dagmar Herzog, John-Paul
Himka, Alf Lu¨ dtke, Jitka Maleckova, Mica Nava, Frank Mort, Moishe
Postone, Claudia Ritter, Adelheid von Saldern, Michael Schneider, Bill
Schwarz, Lewis Siegelbaum, Carolyn Steedman, Michael Warner, and Eli
Zaretsky.
A variety of seminars and conferences gave me the chance to try out
parts of the argument, including a conference on “The Crisis of Socialism”
in Chapel Hill in 1990; a theme year on “Utopia” at the University of
Michigan Humanities Institute (1993); a memorial conference on Edward
Thompson at Princeton (1994); a summer school for Eastern European
political scientists in Gdansk (1994); a conference on twentieth-century
Britain and Germany at Portsmouth (1995); a conference on “Anti-Fascism
and Resistance” at the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome (1995); the
Twentieth-Century Seminar in New York (1997); the Sawyer Seminar on
“Democratic Detours” at Cornell (1998); and the Congress of Contemporary
Spanish Historians in Valencia (2000). To all of these colleagues,
and to audiences at the University of California in Davis and Santa Cruz
(1993), SUNY-Stony Brook (1994), University of Minnesota (1994), University
of Warwick (1995), University of Tel Aviv (1996), University of
British Columbia (1999), the German Studies Colloquium in Ann Arbor
(1999), and the New School University (2000), I’m exceedingly grateful.
Especially valuable in this respect was the workshop on “Women and Socialism
in Interwar Europe” organized by Helmut Gruber in Paris in 1994,
whose proceedings were published as Women and Socialism / Socialism and
Women: Europe between the Wars, ed. Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves
This book could not have been written without the extraordinarily rich
(New York: Berghahn Books, 1998).
historiography now available for its various parts and dimensions, and I’ve
relied necessarily on the insights and originality of specialists, as the footnotes
will confirm. At the most general level of inspiration—intellectually,
historiographically, politically—certain influences run throughout the book
and indeed shape its basic design. In many ways Eric Hobsbawm has been
a career-long mentor, although we’ve only met a handful of times. His
insights shine into the most recondite corners of the Left’s history, as well
as illuminating its bigger picture, and sometimes one’s writing feels like an
extended footnote to his work. Similarly, the works of Perry Anderson,
Stuart Hall, Sheila Rowbotham, and Hilary Wainwright are the crucial
foundations on which my book has tried to build. If they find this a good
book to think and argue with, I’ll feel satisfied indeed.
Finally, some debts deserve to be especially honored. Books are written
not only from libraries, archives, and seminar rooms but also from the
wider contexts of personal and everyday life. In the earlier stages Eleanor
Anasar provided vital supports. Over many years, through our parenting,
working lives, and struggles against the school district she always kept me
honest, helping me grasp not only the unity of theory and practice but why
the personal has to be made political. The friendship of Karl and Diane
Pohrt anchors me in similar ways. Karl’s consistent and inventive observance
of the ethical life, his civic engagement, and his commitment to the
exchange of ideas in the public sphere provide a cast-iron model of political
decency. He is the best bridge from the sixties, wonderful testimony to their
active meanings in the present. For pleasures and enjoyment, for wisdom
and understanding, and for solidarities and fellowship in the sheer arduousness
of making a life, I’ve relied on an essential community of friends.
In addition to everyone else mentioned, I can thank Nancy Bogan, Katherine
Burnett, Paul Edwards, Eric Firstenberg, Jeff Jordan, Sharon Lieberman,
Vic Lieberman, Helga Lu¨ dtke, Armena Marderosian, Brady Mikusko,
Bob Moustakas, Debbie Orlowski, Irene Patalan, Hubert Rast, Eli Rosenberg,
Laura Sanders, Mike Schippani, and Denise Thal.
My dear friend and comrade Ron Suny has been present in the book
from the start. As reader, lunch companion, conference organizer, fellow
enthusiast, erudite and good-hearted colleague, latenight interlocutor, and
sovereign historian of Bolshevism, his advice and support grounded my
writing throughout. During the mid 1980s we worked together on the history
of Communism and then watched spellbound as Gorbachev cracked
open the Soviet Union’s inertia and prised loose the opportunities for
change. By the excellence of his own work and in countless conversations,
Ron guided me through the complexities of Soviet history and the wider
histories of socialism. Loyally and critically, he read the manuscript at every
stage. Keith Nield has been there even longer. An article we wrote together
in 1979, finished en route to the United States, was part of the preamble
to this project. My grasp of the book’s larger analytical dimensions, as well
as my understanding of modern Britain, owe an enormous amount to his
ideas. During the 1990s we shared far more than a common project on the
contemporary histories of class, and the final stage of my writing benefited
hugely from our long-running conversation.
In more ways than one Germany sits at the center of this book—during
the second part as the exemplar of radicalism and then during the third as
the vehicle of disaster. Atina Grossmann guided me through those histories,
from the exhilirating 1920s into the horrors of the Third Reich and out
through the ambivalence of Liberation. Her own writings and an essay we
wrote together on the movie Schindler’s List help me grasp those histories
far better than before. My indebtedness to her friendship and wisdom is
incalculable. At a crucial stage of the book, Lauren Berlant inspired me to
think differently about some of the biggest questions—about the nation
and its relationship to the local, about the two-way transmissions between
personal everydayness and large-scale social transformation, and about the
dialectics of utopia and failure. Though that conversation began with the
1920s and took many routes, its real resting place was sixty-eight, and the
entire last part of the book presumes its influence. She unsettles political
complacency and discouragement better than anyone I know. Bob Moeller
has been the most selfless and reassuring of intellectual critics. His own
work on the 1950s vastly helped my understanding, but he also provided
a thorough and acute reading of a first draft long enough to test the most
reliable friendship. Subsequent versions built gratefully on his detailed critique.
All these friends contributed immeasurably to whatever strengths my
book might possess. They offer the best supports for optimism in a world
increasingly exhausting its supply. The very best support of all is provided
by Gina Morantz-Sanchez. She entered my life as the book approached its
most difficult final stage. She challenged me into completing it. She purged
my writing of excess and guided me toward clarity. She read every word,
of which there were very many. From her great knowledge of U.S. history,
the history of feminism, and the history of women, she brought invaluable
comparative perspectives. She clarified the book’s big ideas and pushed me
into strengthening them. The final version breathes her presence. Of course,
finishing a book requires other supports, too, and it’s impossible to express
adequately my gratitude for all the ways she kept me on track, at the cost
inevitably of the other parts of life. Of unfailing good judgment, she helped
guide this book to its finish.
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