The problem of social democracy

Marrying, in more or less coherent ways, traditions of republican radicalism with the new collective agencies being thrown up by the industrial revolution, the first social democratic parties emerged in the later nineteenth century in response to the traumatic social dislocations and unprecedented economic polarisation then underway. Many have struggled to accommodate the rightful claims of new collective agencies arising from outside the pale of the original settlements - be they militant shop stewards, movements for women's liberation, or marginalised racial groups - at the same time as facing reassertions of power from resurgent, or reinvented, economic and political elites.