The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford Handbooks in Politics & International Relations) by Freeden Michael & Sargent Lyman Tower & Stears Marc

Author:Freeden, Michael & Sargent, Lyman Tower & Stears, Marc [Freeden, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

‘I have often compared socialism to the heart’, wrote Jean Jaurès in 1907. ‘It has, like the heart, pulsations, rhythm, alternate movements of expansion and contraction’ (quoted in Kloppenberg 1986: 296). As we have seen, Jaurès’s powerful image resonates with the subsequent history of social democratic ideology—its heroic moments of political creativity, its grubby compromises in the face of implacable circumstances, its outright defeats. Social democratic political thought has offered what Ernst Wigforss described as a ‘provisional utopia’: ‘visions of social conditions different from those that surround us’ but ‘developed with sufficient concreteness that they can stand out as conceivable alternatives to the given reality or to other models of the future’ (quoted in Tilton 1990: 44). Such provisional utopianism connects the more mundane day-to-day political battles to a larger vision and set of ideals, yet remains open to revising that vision in the light of future experience. As Kołakowski has observed, this mix of idealism and empiricism ‘has invented no miraculous devices to bring about the perfect unity of men or universal brotherhood’ (Kołakowski 1982: 11). But it has influenced the political trajectory of many nations, and in doing so transformed the life chances of many millions of people. By inserting and protecting egalitarian and communitarian domains within broadly capitalist economies, and representing the interests of the disadvantaged in political systems formerly monopolized by the rich, social democracy has gone some way towards making the rhetoric of democratic liberty and equality a lived, and attractive, reality.

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