Overview

"""This is a serious and accomplished synthesis. . . . Biographical vignettes enliven the presentation of ideas, and references to studies of regional diversities . . . give the narrative an uncommonly rich texture. . . . Lucid and illuminating. . . . It is the best book on the subject to put into the hands of our students.""-Helmut Gruber, International Labor and Working Class History ""A synthetic narrative by a young academic scholar . . . who has independent ideas on an important subject. . . . This book is worth reading if for no other reason than its modest, but nonpatronizing rehabilitation from generations of Marxist caricature of a host of deeply democratic European socialists.""-James H. Billington, Washington Post Book World ""One asset of this book is its lack of the overbearing personal partisanship one finds in so many historical studies of socialism. . . . [Lindeman incorporates] some recent and inaccessible studies in social history written 'from the bottom up.'""-David D'Arcy, World View ""As a whole, Lindemann offers a more balanced treatment of the ideas and the movement of socialism than found in many extant histories. . . . A must for all college and university libraries.""-Choice ""A competent and fair-minded study of a controversial subject. It presents much factual material and judicious interpretation in lucid prose.""-L. S. Stavrianos, Los Angeles Times Book Review"

Full Product Details

9780300032468

Table of Contents

Reviews

More an intellectual history of European socialism than a history of socialist politics, oddly - about the ideas of Rousseau, Paine, Cobbett, Babeuf, Owen, Luxemburg, Kautsky, and others of more-than-European importance. A history of European socialism, also, that founders on the problem of definition: Santa Barbara historian Lindemann spends a lot of time on the Soviet Union and on Western communist parties. As regards the thinkers, Lindemann's treatment lacks subtlety and color: to depict Marx as casting about until he discovers the proletariat is to fall somewhere between a theoretical understanding and a biographical insight. The successive thinkers, moreover, are often categorized in terms familiar to present-day historians but not to the subjects Was Babeuf (1760-1797) a communist? Was Marx a Leninist? (Yes and probably not, says Lindemann.) The intellectualist approach does at least pay off by providing summaries of a lot of writers; less can be said of the approach to socialism as a movement. To treat the Russian Revolution as a European socialist event is legitimate, for it did occur in European Russia. But once the USSR was in place, there are both ideological and geographical reasons for relegating it to secondary importance. Instead, Lindemann goes through the Stalinist phase in detail, and also devotes considerable attention to the communist parties of France and Germany - which stretches socialism from the communist hard-liners of the late 1920s to Helmut Schmidt. On the long, long way from Luddism to the German Social Democrat's policy of worker participation, furthermore, there is no attempt to provide an interpretation of socialism that would not only contain both but would help readers see how the path was traveled from one to the other. George Lichtheim's two books - advisedly, one on socialism and one on Marxism - remain the standard. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available