ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOCIALISM: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century.<i> By Donald Sassoon</i> .<i> The New Press: 965 pp., $39.95</i>

The creation of a harmonious society in which human beings collectively share the world’s resources without greed or desire for power is a vision that has deeply motivated people for ages. Generations have repeatedly adopted it as the aspiration of their religions, philosophies and social causes, an aspiration that has justly been regarded as a defining, glorious feature of the human spirit in an otherwise often inglorious history.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this ideal seemed closer to realization than it had at any time in the past. As industrial capitalism penetrated ever greater sectors of European society, large secular movements, with huge followings and with often closely reasoned social analyses, emerged that were earnestly committed to achieving such a society under the name of socialism, a generic word that encompassed a great variety of causes such as Marxism, communism, anarchism, syndicalism and social democracy.

The programs of these movements, to be sure, overlapped on some issues and were sharply at variance on others. By the eve of World War I, however, Marxist socialism had achieved an eminence that surpassed that of all its leftist rivals. Although Marxism was far less coherent than many of its acolytes acknowledged, it seemed to offer the most promising possibilities for finally translating the ideal of a collectivist, democratic society into a lived reality.

Thus, nothing would seem more appropriate, in these closing years of the second millennium, than an attempt to understand why Marxism and, more broadly, socialist movements in all their forms failed to achieve their goal of transforming capitalism into a cooperative society. Donald Sassoon’s massive “One Hundred Years of Socialism” might well have been welcomed as the basis for making so needed an assessment. The scope of the book is appropriately ambitious, beginning as it does with the late 19th century development of socialism and ending in 1994 with a chapter on the “new revisionism,” an effort underway to rethink socialism’s tenets since the Soviet system’s collapse in 1991.

As a resource on the recent history of Social Democratic parties in the Western European left--especially Britain, France, Germany and Italy--the book is serviceable. Although Tony Blair, who has been at work for years remaking the British Labor Party in the image of the Democratic Leadership Conference (and whose vague political platform may yet be a deception for the British electorate that swept him and his party into office earlier this month), is mentioned only twice, the drift of most of the major Social Democratic parties away from socialism and toward something slightly to the left of their erstwhile conservative rivals is told in a great deal of detail.

Unfortunately, however, this huge text is little more than a resource. And its appalling index frequently defeats even that purpose. It gives lengthy lists of page numbers with hardly any subentries. The reader searching for information about a specific aspect of, for example, the British Labor Party will come up against nearly 15 lines of solid page numbers with no subheadings for guidance.

These defects would be tolerable if the book dealt in a reasonably balanced way with European socialism over the past century. But Sassoon confines his history largely to European socialism’s allegedly Marxist offshoot--actually, to social democracy, which Marx himself would have eschewed as too parliamentary and reformist. Nor does the book quite live up to its title’s claim of covering a century of socialist history. Socialism’s tumultuous development over the first half of the century, a crucial period in its history, is compressed into only 115 pages. The remaining 600 or so pages of text are given over to a dense, often tedious and uneven account of social democracy’s career in and out of various governments, from Germany to Finland.

In a history of socialism that is confined to Western Europe, it is hard to account for the almost complete absence of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. This conflict tested the validity of all theories, projections, tactics and behavior of the socialist--and, significantly, anarchosyndicalist--movements of the era. But Sassoon mentions it only incidentally. Where he gives a line that has any substance about the Civil War, he presents the war as a problem of agrarian redistribution, not as a massive working-class revolution.

In the view of many socialist historians, including very recent ones such as Burnett Bolloten, the Spanish Civil War (or revolution, as it is more properly called) signaled the beginning of the greatest experiment in workers’ control of industry and agriculture in history. To a heart-wrenching extent, this immense conflict revealed the contradictions in and limitations of the politics of class collaboration, such as the effort communists made to ally themselves with middle-class centrist and often anti-socialist parties, which were comparable to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party in the United States. Yet Sassoon hardly gives the reader the faintest notion of either the radicalism of the Spanish Civil War or of its significance for other tendencies within socialism.

Having breezed skimpily through the first 50 years of the century--the Russian, German, Bavarian, Hungarian and other revolutions between 1917 and 1919 that profoundly shaped socialism’s course for the remainder of the century are hardly dealt with--Sassoon proceeds to delve exhaustively into every fiscal, economic, political and foreign policy detail with which social democratic movements were concerned in the post-World War II period, an arguably golden age of capitalism that is, like it or not, still going on with great vigor for present-day CEOs. He concludes with social democracy’s failure in all European countries in the early 1990s.

Although the book’s focus on details is intense (and its vision leaps unevenly and disproportionately from country to country), the reader understandably concludes that Sassoon’s point of view is that the Social Democratic parties “are the only left that is left.” But before he can draw such an arguable conclusion, Sassoon should be obliged to address large problems that, alas, his book handles only glancingly or virtually ignores: Is the working class inherently a revolutionary class, as Marx supposed? What effects will the unbridled growth of capitalism and the spread of industry have on the planet if they are left unchecked? Marx’s greatest single achievement was to predict, with very sound reasoning, that capitalism is above all an economy of unending growth and industrialization that nothing short of a socialist revolution can arrest, a prediction of which Sassoon merely takes note.

Other problems not addressed in this book still remain unresolved among leftists in the West. Can a party structure geared to parliamentarism, or the attempt to establish socialism by strictly parliamentary rather than by revolutionary means avoid morally corrosive features of statecraft such as the surrender of basic socialist principles to achieve short-term electoral gains? Should socialism be replaced by approaches that libertarian socialists and social anarchists advance, notably confederal movements deeply rooted in grass-roots control? Are there indeed issues that can unite such disparate groups as “miners, hospital cleaners, computer operators, senior civil servants, university professors, footballers, night club bouncers”--to adduce Sassoon’s seemingly tongue-in-cheek list--who have “an affinial class position” with wage earners? A few years ago, left Greens (most of whom are left libertarians, not Social Democrats), were trying to form just such a movement around issues of broad trans-class concern such as ecological ones, problems that have still not received their due in the formulation of a future radical agenda.

Surprisingly, the book is very dated on events that are more than a decade old. Sassoon is embarrassingly in error when he describes Rudolf Bahro as a German Green and even a “fundi” (or anarchistic “fundamentalist”). Bahro broke with the Greens--and the left generally--in the early 1980s and has become very much of a mystic with eco-fascistic tendencies in the eyes of his critics. The English translation of Bahro’s latest work, “Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster,” reveals a theocratic authoritarianism that is overtly hostile not only to the left but to the very distinction between left and right. Anna Bramwell, whom Sassoon cites as an authority on ecology movements, including the German Greens, is too reactionary in many of her views to be a credible source in a history of socialism. Petra Kelly, whose derogatory comments on the German Social Democrats Sassoon cites as evidence of “fundi” disdain for compromise, shed her repugnance for realpolitik long before her death.

There is compelling need for a readable and focused account of Western socialism that addresses the enormous strategic problems it has faced--and that the world still faces--in this century. To be of value, such a history would have to be richly interpretive and use factual material to explain the failure of great social movements to replace capitalism.

It is unfortunate that Sassoon’s book, valuable as it may be as a resource, does not satisfy this need. By limiting himself to social democracy, essentially in the latter half of the 20th century, and by sacrificing depth for breadth, he has produced more of a reference book than a history that offers details rather than nourishing generalizations. Any true new left that emerges in the coming years will need a thorough understanding of its pedigree in a more penetrating fashion than Sassoon has provided.