Politics against pessimism

The book assesses the potential for a social democratic resurgence today by retrieving of the ideas of Swedish politician Ernst Wigforss, who challenged party ideologists' passivity and insisted on a positive action. He proved that full employment, equity and economic democracy are within reach of a principled politics.

Neoliberalism has now failed, so can a social democratic resurgence replace it? This book retrieves the political thought of Swedish politician Ernst Wigforss to explore the unrealised potential of social democracy. Wigforss drew on many schools of thought to produce an alternative social democratic strategy. It outflanked economic liberalism, allowed his party to dominate Swedish politics for a half-century, and his country to achieve affluence and social equity as converging rather than competing objectives. OECD economies have since evolved political capacities the welfare state, corporatist regulation, expanded citizen entitlements, civic amenity far in excess of pessimistic evaluations offered by mainstream analyses. This book suggests that such developments confirm Wigforss's ideas, confounding conventional pessimism. Full employment, social equity, economic democracy, new political institutions, and transformative economic management are now more imaginable than ever in western countries. But their achievement depends on a radical reformist political mobilisation of the kind that Wigforss inspired, one which integrates these aspirations as mutually reinforcing goals.

Auteur

Winton Higgins and Geoff Dow have each taught political science and political economy courses for many years - Higgins at Macquarie University (but now a visiting fellow at UTS); and Dow at The University of Queensland. Winton Higgins is a graduate in arts, law and politics from Sydney, Stockholm and London universities.
Geoff Dow is a graduate in economics, sociology and politics from Queensland.

Contenu

Contents: The struggle over market society: from economic liberalism to the defence of politics - Industrial society and social democratic politics: political organisation in Sweden - Wigforss's democratic commitment: repositioning socialist politics - The democratisation and politicisation of capitalism: from British collectivist liberalism to Swedish social democracy in the 1920s - Statecraft, employment and welfare in the 1930s and 1940s - Citizenship and the social question in the postwar period - Trade union organisation as the bearer of substantive rationality - Comparative evolution of social democratic possibilities - The responsibilities of labour in social democratic politics - The state and deliberation: on the economic possibilities of politics.