Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Shifting conceptions of social justice were intricately entangled with changing conceptions of the market in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Understanding this interwoven history requires an analysis of the anthropological, moral, social, and political implications constructions of a market order. This observation is the starting point for a sketch of three distinctive periods in Western European history of entanglements between conceptions of social justice and understandings of the market. In the first period, defined by the social question, a notion of property as entitlements to social security created the social basis for the recognition of political agency and the empowerment of precarious workers. In a second period, notions of social justice centred on the creation and maintenance of a productive workforce, with sufficient spending power to contribute to the efficiency of markets and the growth of national wealth. The third period was characterised by an understanding of social justice as a disturbance of the price mechanism resulting from the capture of the state by self-interested professionals and interest groups. Social justice is not an alternative to a market morality; they together contribute to shifting entanglements of ‘socially’ informed markets and ‘market’ informed constellations of social justice.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.

This chapter introduces the cases of populist radical right parties in local government in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland that are the empirical focus of the book. It outlines the contextual background to their entry into local government, showing the multiple pathways they took to attain power. To do so, the chapter first considers long- and short-term contextual factors that led to an increased demand for populist parties in localities that had previously been strongholds of the centre-left. Then the chapter turns to the electoral campaigns, and the internal and external supply-side factors behind the populist radical right successes. It also considers the strategic position of these localities for the central parties, and the central-local party relations during the campaign. Finally, it details the election results and the subsequent formation of governments, including the formation of coalitions and allocation of executive responsibilities. Ultimately, the chapter shows the different forms of ‘local power’ that populist radical right parties held after their election victories in these cases and the reasons behind the cross-national differences.

Chapter 6 traces the meaning of ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic policies. ‘Modernising the economy’ to achieve sustainable growth was a consistently crucial idea for Labour from Wilson to Blair. Notwithstanding the abandonment of nationalisation, the endurance of state-led ‘modernisation’ in Labour’s economic imaginary reveals a continuing strategic role for the state, even for New Labour. After establishing this continuity, the chapter highlights a crucial change. In the 1970s and 1980s, Labour policymakers assumed that manufacturing was the key sector to ‘modernise’. Yet, under the influence of deindustrialisation, ideas of ‘post-Fordism’, and New Keynesianism, by the early 2000s manufacturing had been usurped by ‘human capital’. For New Labour, education and training became the new ‘commanding heights’ and the foremost economic priority for the active state. These developments show the ongoing influence of technocratic, social-democratic thought worlds, and thus expose the inappropriateness of shoehorning New Labour into ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. But they also speak to important, and ambivalent, shifts in British political economy by the twenty-first century.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

This chapter explores how ‘globalisation’ became a common frame of reference about the ‘modern world’ and the rise and fall of both nationalist and pan-European socialist responses. It is widely recognised that the ‘discourse of globalisation’ was a lynchpin of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’, and some scholars also argue that it drove the party’s capitulation to ‘Thatcherism’. However, this chapter reconstructs an overlooked source of the idea of globalisation in Labour: the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which underpinned the 1983 manifesto. It traces how, from the 1970s, Labour policymakers diagnosed a powerful new force – ‘multinational’ production and finance – which placed novel constraints on the socialist state. Over the 1980s, these policymakers went from attempting to reassert the British state’s sovereignty to trying to transcend it through European integration. The AES collapsed after the 1983 electoral catastrophe, while Eurosocialism failed to decisively shape Labour. Yet, these ideas show that the spreading idea of ‘globalisation’ as an unavoidable feature of modernity had many parents in Labour and originated from the party’s left as well as its right.

Chapter 5 discusses how in the context of Germanys historically religion-friendly settlement of benevolent neutrality, the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its references to religion have represented a political and religious watershed moment. Specifically, Chapter 5 focuses on how the emergence of a new identity cleavage in German society has created the socio-demographic conditions and incentives for the AfD’s rise and the latter’s transformation from an anti-Euro ‘professors’ party’ into an identitarian right-wing populist party. It also explores how the AfDs re-politicisation of religion in the context of its right-wing populist identity politics has put into question Germany’s traditional settlement of benevolent neutrality.

Chapter 7 analyses the reactions of Christian voters and the extent to which they are determined by supply-side actors such as the mainstream parties and churches. Particular attention is paid to the empirical finding that irreligious voters in Germany were much more drawn to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) than Christians. This ‘religious immunity’ of German Protestants and Catholics appeared to be partly the result of demand-side factors, such as attitudes or theological beliefs, but mainly dependent on supply-side factors such as the availability of a ‘Christian alterative’ in the German party system as well as the behaviour of the institutional churches, which through their clear and public condemnation of the AfD’s use of religion appear to have created a powerful social taboo surrounding the AfD.

The book concludes by drawing out the implications of the overarching theory and findings for the future of democracy. The chapter argues that laissez-faire extremism and genuine democracy cannot coexist indefinitely. The lack of security and stability of the former will continually generate cultural and democratic discontent, intensifying social conflict and creating ideal conditions for charismatic leaders to emerge. We discuss various alternatives to neoliberalism, including the internationalization of tax and social welfare policy and economic democratization. This leads to our second argument: that democracy can best save itself by making itself worth saving. Democracies should answer the challenges of populism and other forms of discontent by ignoring calls for greater democratic elitism (which would only validate discontented narratives). Instead, democratic institutions and actors, especially political parties, should reform and recommit themselves to their role as channels for citizens’ voices.