Search results for ""Author Donald Sassoon""

'A magnum opus, an accessible and genuinely global history ... This is a book for today and tomorrow' Financial Times Capitalist enterprise has existed in some form since ancient times, but the globalization and dominance of capitalism as a system began in the 1860s when, in different forms and supported by different political forces, states all over the world developed their modern political frameworks: the unifications of Italy and Germany, the establishment of a republic in France, the elimination of slavery in the American south, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the emancipation of the serfs in Tsarist Russia. This book magnificently explores how, after the upheavals of industrialisation, a truly global capitalism followed. For the first time in the history of humanity, there was a social system able to provide a high level of consumption for the majority of those who lived within its bounds. Today, capitalism dominates the world.With wide-ranging scholarship, Donald Sassoon analyses the impact of capitalism on the histories of many different states, and how it creates winners and losers by constantly innovating. This chronic instability, he writes, 'is the foundation of its advance, not a fault in the system or an incidental by-product'. And it is this instability, this constant churn, which produces the anxious triumph of his title. To control or alleviate such anxieties it was necessary to create a national community, if necessary with colonial adventures, to develop a welfare state, to intervene in the market economy, and to protect it from foreign competition. Capitalists needed a state to discipline them, to nurture them, and to sacrifice a few to save the rest: a state overseeing the war of all against all.Vigorous, argumentative, surprising and constantly stimulating, The Anxious Triumph gives a fresh perspective on all these questions and on its era. It is a masterpiece by one of Britain's most engaging and wide-ranging historians.

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The deadly coronavirus spread across societies already riddled with political ills: rampant xenophobia and corruption, privatisation run amok, Brexiteer vainglory of 'a global Britain', a Euroland dominated by self-proclaimed nasty parties, and in America, the unspeakable Trump. As the acclaimed historian Donald Sassoon observes in this blistering polemic, there were morbid symptoms galore.Sassoon paints an unforgettable picture of our galloping descent into political barbarism, mixing blunt exposé and classical references with an astonishing array of data. Why does the United States proportionately have more civilians owning guns than Yemen, where there is a war on? Why did the UK enter the pandemic with fewer doctors than any EU country except Poland and Romania? In Morbid Symptoms he refuses to abandon what Antonio Gramsci termed the optimism of the will, instead recalling a line from Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentine: 'do not impute past disorders to the nature of the men, but to the times, which, being changed, give reasonable ground to hope that, with better government, our city will have better fortune in the future'.

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This new edition of Donald Sassoon's magisterial history of the Left in the twentieth century includes a substantial new introduction by the author. 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.

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