The premise underlying this investigation—that old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action—needs an introductory word of explanation.

The unexpected resurgence of the right, not only in the United States but throughout much of the Western world, has thrown the left into confusion and called into question all its old assumptions about the future : that the course of history favored the left; that the right would never recover from the defeats it suffered during the era of liberal and social democratic ascendancy; that some form of socialism, at the very least a more vigorous form of the welfare state, would soon replace free-market capitalism. Who would have predicted, twenty-five years ago, that as the

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