Politics for a Rational Left

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain's most distinguished historians, tackles the current impasse of the left. In a series of cogent and elegant contributions he elaborates a strategy for the defeat of Thatcherism and the opening of a new era of progressive and democratic politics.<br><br>Hobsbawm situates the left's recent difficulties within a longer historical perspective: the epochal crisis of the 'classic labour movement' created by new patterns of urbanization and post-industrial economics. He argues that in Britain this crisis has been exacerbated by a factionalism which obstructs the creation of rational alliances, and by an insularity which blinds the left to valuable lessons from elsewhere in Europe. Unity of the left, around a broad and imaginative programme including major reform of the electoral system, is the only effective response to a Conservative government which has made a radical break with the post-war consensus.<br><br><i>Politics for a Rational Left </i>sets Hobsbawm's influential political analyses in the context of more discursive contributions ranging over themes such as working-class organization in the modern city, the appeal of nationalism in contemporary society, the lessons of the pre-war Popular Front, and his own formative political experience. Hobsbawm emerges from these pages as a hard-headed and lucid political commentator whose dismissal of wishful thinking and party chauvinism never deflects from an underlying commitment to the relevance of socialism for the 1990s.<br><br><b>Published in association with Marxism Today </b>