[1] One other book by Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ House: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (Little Brown, 2019), explores the role of the rise of economists even in the third period of Mudge’s work. But this is more in the vein of economic journalism.

Review of Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented

By Gabriel Chouhy Algorta, Tulane University

Stephanie Mudge (2018) has written a superb and much-welcome book that certainly makes a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the great transformations in western capitalist democracies during the 20th century. Much has been already said about this impressive attempt at explaining the two historical reinventions of leftism-–from socialism to Keynesianism, and from Keynesianism to neoliberalism–through a historical-comparative analysis of the changing role of different types of party experts in four major Left parties of the West: the German Social Democratic Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the British Labor Party, and the Democratic Party in the US. A standard review would certainly fall back on providing a balanced, dispassionate assessment of how greatly or poorly this book fares in advancing existing knowledge in political sociology. Hence my choice here is exactly the opposite: to highlight Mudge’s contribution not to the sociology of leftist politics but to the politics of leftist sociologists.