What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

[Beet]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519

A startlingly good essay, particularly on the big picture.

[Beet]

What do you like about it? I only read the first half, but nothing struck me as particularly novel or insightful. It seemed to me like social democracy at its worst: moral indignation as political philosophy.

I like the framing of social democracy as an 'ideology' of fear. I like the framing of it as somewhat conservative. I like the idea that it has the same contextual genesis as the 20th century libertarians, only very different conclusions. These things help make it far more than just 'moral indignation'.

[Beet]

It's not just that they want to conserve social democracy itself, but the idea that social democracy is a means of conserving the liberal order, partly politically through society, and partly economically. The goal is stability, and each part should be judged on how well it serves its respective goal.

As for the Chicago School, I noticed that too, but this article is America- centric, Chicago is in the Anglo world, Austria is not. And the Austrian School was an influence on the Chicago School, partly through Hayek, who was Mises's student.

[Beet]

I find Tony Judt a bit of a self-righteous bore sometimes (at least in his Postwar) and curiously obsessed with the history of the Marxism and Communism and yet only distantly with the Soviet Union (It's complicated).

Actually, he came off as quite conservative in Postwar, so something like this came off as a surprise.

Still, you can't begrudge a recent past historian like himself of seeing the value of social democracy through a twentieth century lens. The triumph of social democracy in the West was a twentieth century product.