Reinventing the Left in the Global South
The Politics of the Possible

A fresh appraisal of the nature and significance of the democratic left in the Global South.

Richard Sandbrook (Author)

9781107421097, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 7 August 2014

309 pages, 3 b/w illus. 2 tables
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

'Richard Sandbrook's Reinventing the Left in the Global South is an ambitious book, inspired by local activism and progressive movements in Latin America and Asia, and setting these in a comprehensive history of the modern Left. Its main theoretical roots lie in Polanyi: Sandbrook sees the contemporary movements as organic societal responses to utopian (neoliberal) market-building efforts.' James E. Mahon, Jr, Latin American Research Review

This book offers a fresh appraisal of the nature and significance of the democratic Left in the Global South. The moral and intellectual leadership of the Left is shifting south from its European birthplace. It is in the Global South, most notably in Latin America, that one finds newly self-confident progressive movements. This 'new' democratic Left includes parties and social movements that not only are avoiding the familiar pitfalls that ensnared socialists and social democrats in the twentieth century, but also are coping with the realities of the twenty-first century, especially neoliberal globalization. In analyzing and illustrating three innovative strategies - moderate social democracy, radical social-democratic transition to socialism, and Left populism - this study nudges the debate about the Left out of the well-worn grooves into which it has fallen in recent decades.

1. Reinventing the Left
2. Alternative visions: leftist versus neoliberal paradigms
3. How neoliberalism fails
4. Making history: agency, constraints and realities
5. Pitfalls and promise of the moderate Left
6. The radical Left: moving beyond the socialist impasse
7. Politics of the possible.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB]