Donald Sassoon was born in Cairo and educated in Paris, Milan and London. He is Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, University of London and is the author of several highly acclaimed books, including Contemporary Italy: Politics, Economy and Society Since 1945, Mona Lisa: The History of the World's Most Famous Painting, The Culture of the Europeans and Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism.

With unique authority and unparalleled scholarship, Sassoon traces the fortunes of the political parties of the left in Western Europe across 14 countries, covering the fortunes of socialism from the rise of the Bolsheviks through two World Wars to the revival of feminism and the arrival of "green" politics.

List of Tables
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

New Introduction
Introduction to the First Edition

Book One: Expansion

Part One: The Hard Road to Political Power

1. The Establishment of Socialism Before 1914
2. From War to War (1914-40)
3. Thwarted Alternatives
4. The War, Resistance and Its Aftermath: The Rise and Fall of West European Communism 1939-48

Book Two: Consolidation

Part Two: The Construction of Western Socialism 1945-50

5. The Socialists After 1945
6. Building Social Capitalism 1945-50
7. External Constraints: A Socialist Foreign Policy?

Part Three: Toward Revisionism 1950-69

8. The Golden Age of Capitalism
9. Between Neutralism and Atlanticism
10. The Foundations of Revisionism

Part Four: The Perplexing Sixties: 'Something in the Air'

11. The Return of the Left
12. The Establishment of a Foreign Policy Consensus

Part Five: The Great Contestation

13. The Revival of Working Class Militancy 1960-73
14. The Revival of Ideology and the Student Contestation
15. The Revival of Feminism

Book Three: Crisis

Part Six: The End of the Great Capitalist Boom 1973-89

16. The Crisis and the Left: An Overview
17. Social Democracy in Small Countries: Austria, Sweden, Holland and Belgium
18. Germany and Britain: SPD and Labour in Power
19. The French Experiment
20. The Failure of Italian Communism
21. The End of Authoritarian Regimes in Western Europe: Portugal, Spain and Greece

Part Seven: The Great Crisis of Socialism

22. Workers, Women and Greens
23. The 1980s: Radicalism in its Last Redoubt
24. The New Revisionism

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index