Essential Works of Socialism [antikvár]

Preface to the Third EditionFirst published in 1970, this anthology now enters its third edition, quite radically transformed-in response to new circumstances and needs-since its two earlier versions. The book has been slimmed down considerably, with several hundred pages of earlier text omitted and about one hundred pages of new material added. What has been lost as a result of this change is a good deal of writing that embodies or illuminates earlier phases of socialist and Marxist history and thought. Readers interested in such matters would do well to go back to the first two editions, which are available in some bookstores and many libraries. But the loss in breadth and range has, I think, been compensated for by a sharpening of intellectual focus. What has been gained in this third edition is a number of reflective essays representing recent efforts to rethink the socialist project in light of the political experiences of the last half century-which means, among other things, the disasters of totalitarianism and the real, if limited, achievements of the welfare state.I have dropped the introduction to the first two editions, in which, at some length, I had tried to give historical context and introductory guidance to the complex entanglements of left-wing thought over the past century and a half But I have added, at the very end of this book, an essay of my own that, while retracing some of the same historical ground as my earlier introduction, offers one estimate-critical but with hope-of where socialism as movement and idea stands toward the end of the twentieth century.Some readers may find it helpful to use this concluding essay as a kind of introduction, perhaps to be read first; others, more wiUing to plunge unaided into the thickets of socialist thought, may prefer to read the concluding essay after they have gone