RECOMMENDED READING

The final chapter explains why social democratic countries like France, Germany, Spain, and Holland dominate the World Cup in recent years and why no Communist country ever managed to win. Even a tiny social democratic nation like Iceland has seen its national team in international competition punch way above its weight.

The highly regarded biography of the man who ran for U.S. President five times on the Socialist ticket between 1900 and 1920.  Salvatore sees Debs as working within the finest traditions of American radical republicanism.

Nichols revives a sadly neglected American history especially in his account of Socialist governance in Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century and the contributions to the Black Freedom Struggle of great Socialists such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

This slender but essential volume was published in the Fall of 2020.  It is cogent in its analysis of the Sanders influence in the U.S., the defeat of the British Labor party in the last general election, and the current deficiencies of the DSA.

This is an incredibly timely collection of essays from well-credentialed writers, many of them associated with Dissent magazine. There’s no better starting point for the state of American democratic socialism today.

Steves, famous for his superb travel guides and videos, expresses his social democratic sympathies in his chapter on Denmark in this book, which also includes excellent chapters on drug policy in Europe and on the importance of the European Union.

Orwell’s classic account of the lives of English coal miners in the Depression and of his belief in the necessity of democratic socialism in a world threatened by left and right-wing totalitarianism.

This sadly forgotten experiment in democratic socialism occurred under the rule of the Mensheviks and featured free elections, press freedom, land reform, and free trade unions until independent Georgia was crushed by the Communists and incorporated into the USSR.  Lee is a historian now based in London, a veteran of the DSOC and the Israeli kibbutz movement.

This is a superb biography of Michael Harrington, author of the anti-poverty classic The Other America and founder of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (predecessor of the DSA).

Berman is a leading political scientist who teaches at Columbia and writes from a social democratic perspective. All of her books on European politics are invaluable resources.

This magisterial history by a British historian devotes nearly 800 pages of text to coverage of European Socialism from WW I through the collapse of Communism at the end of the 1980’s.

Reflections on politics and literature from one of the finest stylists in the English language.  This collection includes the essay in which Orwell states “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Judt was the scholar best known for his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.  He wrote this elegiac case for social democracy while dying from a degenerative disease.  There is a lot in this little volume about Judt’s love for trains and the public sector.

Michael Harrington, America’s leading Socialist from the 1960’s until his passing in 1989, analyzes the history and state of the movement from its origins into the 1980’s.

Geoghegan, a labor attorney from Chicago, focuses especially upon German social democratic policies in the workplace and the personal benefits of strong unions and the welfare state.