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

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.

Table of Contents:
PART ONE: MAKING DEMOCRACY SOCIAL: PREPARING THE FUTURE ; PART TWO: REVOLUTIONARY EUROPE, 1914-1923 ; PART THREE: STABILISATION AND THE "WAR OF POSITION" ; PART FOUR: FUTURE IMPERFECT

About the Author :
Geoff Eley is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of many books on British and German history, including Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck.

Review :
"Shaped by the ideals of equality, liberty and solidarity, the idea of the left was represented by the democratic movementof the nineteenth century and later by socialist and communist movements. Recent histories of the left have not added anything new to this vision. By contrast, Geoff Eley's book has the merit ofhaving enriched both the conceptualization and the historical narrative of this key aspect of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."- Slavic Review "Combining the learning and analysis of the historian with the commitment of the student radical of 1968,Geoff Eley has written a manifesto of hope in democracy, and a long, regretful good-bye to the movements of the Left which, for 150 years, gave it its reality. Those who want to understand the history of Europe since 1848 will do well to read this wide-ranging and multinational survey, written with both thoght and feeling."--Eric Hobsbawm ""A remarkable feat--a clear, balanced history of left politics which includes social and cultural movements from women's liberation to proletarian nudism, from Bolshevik street theater to New Age travellers. Geoff Eley covers the well-known international events along with the suppressed and marginalized. His long view defies forgetfulness and suggest that what will be found relevant in the future is always unexpected."--Sheila Rowbotham "Ranging over a century and a half and the entire continent of Europe, and with a cast of characters including unionists, feminists, radical intellectuals, political radicals, and many others, this remarkable book offers a much-needed account of the history of European radicalism. And it provides essential historical background for the rethinking of purposes and intellectual premises in which the European -- and American -- Left is now engaged."--Eric Foner