The New Reckoning (PDF)

We are told that this is a new world, with which old theories
cannot cope. But the dynamic driving the current global
transformation is not as new as our pundits and politicians
pretend. The global market-place of our day may have little in
common with the tamed welfare capitalism of the post-war period but
it is uncannily reminiscent of the untamed capitalism of 100 years
ago. Keynes and Beveridge may be dead, but Marx, Malthus and
Ricardo have had a new lease of life.

In these timely essays, David Marquand challenges the
fashionable amnesia of the 1990s and addresses the crucial
questions raised by the capitalist renaissance which has followed
the collapse of Communism and the end of the cold war. In this
bewildering new world, which is at the same time an
all-too-familiar old world, how can the values of social solidarity
and democratic citizenship be realized? Granted that socialism is
no longer with us, does it have anything to say from beyond the
grave?

How is socialism's great antagonist, liberalism, faring in this
new world, and what are the prospects of an accommodation between
the two? Where does the new medievalism of contemporary Europe fit
in? How do the special peculiarities of the British state, the
identity it embodies and the political economy over which it
presides relate to those wider issues? What room for maneuver do
they give the British left? These questions make up the agenda for
The New Reckoning.