LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION

       The Problem of Hope

      A political tradition has its characteristic principles, policies, and strategies. Beneath or behind these, it also has its characteristic patterns of coherence and instability, its sources of courage and anxiety, its hopes and worries. We recognize a political tradition by its outer features, but it thrives or fades according to its inner rhythms. Debates in recent years about the “renewal of social democracy” have focused on the feasibility and justification of policy programs.¹ This book, in contrast, is an essay on the inner life of the social democratic tradition. Looking at the political thought of one of the giants of social democracy’s founding generation, it aims to recover certain questions asked by that generation, questions that might profitably be asked again by those who would like to see a democratic Left in the twenty-first century that is able to preserve and extend the best of what the twentieth-century Left achieved.

      The story of social democracy’s outer life is well known.² During the middle half of the twentieth century, parties and movements of the democratic Left constructed a new, social democratic model of political life. This model—as momentous an innovation as the nineteenth-century development of political parties based on mass suffrage or the eighteenth-century invention of the constitutional republic—comprised a comprehensive welfare state, extensive collective bargaining, and economic rules that favored equality and stability, all in the context of representative democracy and a market economy. Cultivating broad coalitions rooted in the labor movement and operating both inside and outside government, social democrats were able to reduce material poverty, foster associational life, create beautiful public spaces, and protect civil liberties and democratic institutions. No other version of left-wing politics has been so successful at realizing the Left’s dream of a modern society made fit for human habitation.

      When I describe social democracy as a political tradition, I mean that it is not only this set of actions and results. More fundamentally, it is a distinct way of thinking about and approaching politics that has been sustained over time. Those who have championed the social democratic model have not always called themselves “social democrats”; some have instead called themselves “socialists” or “democratic socialists” or, in America, “labor liberals” or “left-liberals.” Nevertheless, they have been linked with one another by a consistent sense of purpose, by a project capable of being revived even when the tradition’s particular efforts failed or its particular achievements were undone.³ The social democratic tradition is thus defined not only by its strategy and its policy program but also by its broader commitment to freedom, equality, and solidarity. Just as fundamental as those principles is social democracy’s commitment to a genuinely political engagement with the modern world. Social democracy has been among the modern traditions that defend the classical Greek and Roman image of public talk in public spaces and the classical claim that human beings living together in ordered societies have the capacity to change or preserve their social orders through such talk, and, in doing so, to realize common goods.⁴ Thus social democrats have prized political life, with all its uncertainty and messiness; they have sought coalition and compromise rather than absolute victory; they have valued the continued possibility of dissent over the perfect realization of principles. They have declined to seek a society in which conflict has been abolished, in which politics has been transcended, and thus they have been able to embrace the fact of human plurality.⁵

      This history and these orienting commitments are what make social democracy an appealing tradition to me and to many others. That said, I want to point out something about social democracy that may be less obvious, especially in our time. During the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, before there were social democratic governments with the power to enact a policy model, social democrats built a movement. At first no more than an unconventional style within the international socialist movement, this new politics gradually differentiated itself from the rest of the socialist family and emerged as a distinct movement with a forthrightly reformist and democratic character.⁶ In that movement’s early years, as its leaders and members thought about what they were doing and why they supposed it worth doing, they found that the ideas of nineteenth-century socialism (or, for that matter, those of nineteenth-century liberal republicanism) did not allow for an adequate account of their circumstances or their activities, and that they would need a new understanding of political life. That would have been challenge enough, but they also found—and this is what we are less likely to remember—that they had to reflect on the inner life of their movement.

      This was no simple thing to do. For the first generation of social democrats, committing themselves to the practice of democratic politics meant abandoning the extravagant expectations that had oriented the nineteenth-century Left. Utopia, revolution, unbounded progress—what happens when these ideas lose whatever plausibility they may once have had? If the daily work of the socialist movement was not to be seen as a series of steps on the road to a wholly new and fully just society, what reason could the movement’s members have for making the sacrifices demanded by political life? If a final victory was not written into the trajectory of history, what could make participation in the movement worthwhile? What would bind the movement together? The early social democrats seem to have been surprised by the urgency of these questions, and some members of that first social democratic generation tried harder to think through the problems of their movement’s inner life than their descendants would in the period when social democracy moved from success to success. Building a movement, the first social democrats were haunted by the problem of hope.

      Seeking to rebuild that movement, social democrats today are haunted by the same problem and need not face it as if for the first time. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, adherents of neoliberal market fundamentalism have attacked the social democratic model with devastating results. Over the same period, the character of election campaigns has changed; the demographic bases of left parties have shifted; globalization has altered the terms of national policy making. Social democrats in recent years have found their confidence enfeebled, their sense of a common project less sure than it once was. Old questions about social democracy’s inner life have a new relevance.

      That the polemics and introspections of social democrats a century ago might be of interest today may seem an odd notion. Why read old

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