Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000

ISBN-13: 9780195037845 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 720 str.

Geoff Eley

Opis

Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve orgainically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came from the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together.

Recenzje

Histories of socialism can sometimes downgrade and lose sight of the fact that this was a movement in which poor people believed and which they, to a significant degree, built. But Mr Eley tells the story well. One of the books great virtues is that many of the men and women, especially those of lower class birth, who furthered the cause, are given biographies and space.