Octavo. Original dark green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt monogram medallion to front cover, top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed. I wondered whether this term meant something different in the US, compared with British Commonwealth countries. Socialism is a derogatory term for a political philosophy that is condemned by many Americans as more or less the same as Communism, so it didn’t make sense to me that Bernie embraced the term with conviction and enthusiasm in the Post-Communist era. Ink ownership inscriptions on front endpapers dated 1902 (one crossed out, the other decorated with a large floral sketch). Faint marks to otherwise bright cloth, endpapers foxed, contents clean. A very good copy indeed. In Britain Clause IV of the Labour Party’s Constitution which had advocated for the common ownership of big capital was excised by Tony Blair after he assumed leadership of Labour in 1994. The Blair and Brown governments strengthened the neoliberal reforms of the Thatcher and Major eras and gave wholesale support to Bush II’s Middle Eastern forays. Edward Michael Harrington was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, and radio commentator.

Within state ownership, Harrington differentiates between statism and democratic state ownership. Statism is the ownership by a dictatorship or authoritarian state, such as occurred in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Socialism sought, precisely, the democratic socialisation of the process of elitist, irresponsible, and destructive socialisation of capitalism - a process that is very much at work today as revolutionary new modes of producing wealth are being introduced in ways that increase poverty and unemployment and widen the gap between the affluent and hungry areas of the world.” (15) Stylistically, some might find Harrington a bit dry; it took me entirely too long to finish reading this book, although some of that might have just been because it was an absurdly busy three weeks and I was too burned out to focus. I tend to rather like Harrington's authorial "voice"; it's occasionally got a bit of dry humor, but mostly I find it sort of... soothing, in a way? It's certainly less grandstandy than a lot of other well-known socialist writers, and noticeably less pompous than, say, Irving Howe, though Harrington and Howe were good friends and seem to be on a similar ideological wavelength. At any rate, I'm interested enough to have started reading another Harrington book, Toward a Democratic Left, written in 1968, some of which is distressingly relevant, but that's for another review. One of Harrington’s major points is that there is not one definition of socialism, but many rival definitions.Written by an avowed socialist in 1989 just after the market crash, this is a pretty useful overview of the roots of a mediated form of socialism presupposed by much of the educated class of America and Europe today. He argues for a form of socialism that works, in theory, with the market, rather than presupposing the abolition of the market. Harrington wants to make a case that this new democratic socialism is the hope for the 21st century, and, most of all, is not reducible to the authoritarian or dictatorial centralized socialism of Stalinism, Leninism or Third World communism. Communism for Harrington is an antisocialist system of bureaucratic collectivism not part of the history of socialism. I won't go into the details here, but in effect the book wants to refute the conservative argument that socialism is like squaring the circle, that any socialist policy leads inexorably down a royal road to serfdom, since it necessarily involves some sort of central planning, and central planning is the fastest way to frustrate the market's means of setting price according to supply and demand, ultimately concerning the efficient allocation of scarce resources. This is the definitive text on the role of socialism throughout history which Publishers Weekly calls “succinct, readable” and the New York Times says “has a lively air of optimism and boldly challenges traditional ideas.”

This last book written by the eminent American socialist -- composed, in fact, even as he wrestled with the cancer that was to take his life -- is, unfortunately (and, perhaps, unsurprisingly) dated with respect to the prescriptions he discussed for "the future." This work "demonstrated - what all the succeeding poetry volumes would amply confirm - the exceptional number of different stanza forms and metres, whether inherited or invented, that Hardy was able to deploy... Hardy always disclaimed possession of a consistent philosophy, and in the preface to Poems of the Past and the Present described his poems as 'a series of feelings and fancies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances' - adding, perhaps with The Dynasts already in mind, 'Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change'" (ODNB). DescriptionI read this book shortly after it came out at the end of the 1980s and it helped me make my way leftward towards if not socialist politics at least social democracy it got me curious about the DSA in the 1980s or early 1990s it was a long time ago and I don't remember the date exactly. Harrington had spent some time in the Catholic Worker Movement although he later moved toward nonreligious flavors of socialism and I knew people involved in that at Fairfield University and I also knew a few Trotskyists at Fordham. Harrington covers the big tent of socialism and social democracy and all the plans and arguments from the 18th century through the 1980s. A good primer to navigate the many-headed varieties of socialism.