Chapter 1 On Cooperation and Sharing Chapter 2 Making Invisible Causes Visible Chapter 3 The Drama of Spanish Socialism: Tragedy, Farce, or Conceptual Error? (Part 1) Chapter 4 The Drama of Spanish Socialism: Tragedy, Farce, or Conceptual Error? (Part 2) Chapter 5 A Modest Hypothesis Concerning Swedish Social Democracy Chapter 6 Sweden's Rehn-Meidner Model: Too Good to be True, or, The Stumbling Blocks of Freedom and Property Chapter 7 The Revenge of the Iron Law of Wages Chapter 8 Hjalmar Branting's Uppfostran Chapter 9 Karl Popper's Vienna, or, The Straitjacket of Mainstream Social Science Chapter 10 Power and Principle in South Africa Chapter 11 Islam and Economic Rationality in Indonesia Chapter 12 The Stones that the Builders Rejected Chapter 13 Middle-Class Values Chapter 14 The Venezuela That Might Have Been Chapter 15 Social Democracy on a World Scale: The World Bank and the Logic of Love
Joanna Swanger is assistant professor of border studies and resident director of the Border Studies Program at Earlham College. Howard Richards is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Peace & Global Justice Studies at Earlham College.
In this fascinating collection of studies of the obstacles to the
realization of the deep principles of social democracy,
cooperation, and sharing, the endless failures of well-meant
programs of betterment are honestly faced. The key insight,
reflecting movements in the human sciences generally, is to
foreground the role of culture in the reproduction of the obstacles
to the realization of a just world. There are no mechanisms of
failure. Diagnosis is the first step to cure of pathologies, be
they organic, moral, or social. In this book we have a thrilling
beginning.
*Rom Harré, Linacre College*
The Dilemmas of Social Democracies is a spiritually and
historically deep analysis of the origins and development of what
the authors call 'humanity’s greatest achievement so far in
harnessing human energy and mobilizing natural resources and
capital in the service of meeting everybody’s needs.' However,
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger are not interested only in the
historical achievements of Social Democracy but provide also an
original scrutiny of its limits and inherent contradictions. What
is perhaps most striking about this book is its ambitious attempt
to go beyond eurocentrism and learn from a wide variety of global
experiences, from South Africa and Indonesia to Venezuela. In
short, this is a highly recommendable book on social democracy
written from the cosmopolitical perspective of 'ethical
construction of social reality.'
*Heikki Patomäki, University of Helsinki*
Richards and Swanger have given us what we now most sorely need,
informed hope. In a work of stunning scholarship, deeply researched
and broad in vision, interpreted in the light of some of the most
significant modern philosophic and social science works, it
explores highly instructive historic experiences in social
democracy. Their work makes it clearly evident that another world
is, indeed, possible. Within the framework of their concepts of
social action and ethical construction, they vividly articulate the
practical and attainable possibilities for the achievement of
global social justice that lie in the principles of cooperation and
sharing. It is a work that should be read, reflected on, and widely
used by educators, scholars, and activists committed to the
struggle for the possibilities these authors identify in learnings
derived actual historic experience.
*Betty A. Reardon, Teachers College Columbia University*
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