SOCIALISM LOST?

In his preface Thompson argues that structural, sociological and ideological aspects of the economic “environment” foreclosed on socialism during the period in question. The structural aspect was the increased globalisation of economic activity; the sociological was the “triumph of possessive individualism and the uncritical celebration of private as against social consumption” (p. vi); and the ideological was the ascendancy of the nostrums of the New Right. Given the importance attached to these “environmental” forces one might have expected the author to organise his argument by discussing how and why these forces came to be all-powerful in the last quarter of the 20th century.