These essays challenge the fashionable amnesia of the 1990s, and address the crucial questions raised by the capitalist renaissance whch has followed the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War.

In this 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 around, 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 econonmy over which it presides relate to those wider issues? What room for manoeuvre do they give the British Left? These questions make up the agenda for the book.