This will be the standard international history of the world's most successful social democracy.
- Göran Therborn, author, most recently of <i>Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy</i>,
Of all the experiments in socialism undertaken during the twentieth century, one has often been singled out as the best model for the twenty-first: reformist Sweden. How accurate is that? In this elegant chronicle, the foremost historian of Swedish social democracy punctures the illusions. Whatever was good in Sweden was built by popular movements: but the party ended up destroying it. Reformism is a storehouse of mistakes, from which a left for a future needs to learn, and there is no better introduction than this book.
- Andreas Malm,
This volume is perhaps the most comprehensive historical primer on Swedish Social Democracy.
- Joel Nordström, Jacobin
[s]weeping yet succinct...
- Simon Torracinta, Boston Review