Sheri Berman has written an engaging book about the origins, development, and deployment of social democracy in Europe since the late nineteenth century. The central argument is that social democracy, as one of several movements that challenged liberalism and orthodox Marxism, ultimately prevailed over competitors. In Berman's view, the triumphant social democratic reconciliation of capitalism and democracy in post–World War II Europe cannot be understood as simply a muscular form of embedded liberalism; social democracy is a distinct ideology that undergirds a system of political control of capitalism and communitarian policies and institutions.

The first part of the story told by Berman involves two complementary developments that challenged orthodox socialism as Europe's nineteenth century drew to a close. At this time, socialist parties remained committed to historical materialism and class struggle. As a result, they commonly rejected cross-class coalition building, government participation, and reformist policies. Yet nineteenth-century democratization in France led the socialists to engage in democratic politics, reformism, and government participation by the end of the century. For some, the French experience demonstrated the real possibilities afforded socialist parties by politics to shape the well-being of workers and the general character of capitalism.

Also during this period, democratic revisionists, such as Jean Jaurès in France and, especially, Eduard Bernstein in Germany, mounted a penetrating critique of the orthodox position: Capitalism was proving to be especially resilient and developing in complex ways not foretold by Marx; class structure was increasingly more complex, and commonalities of interests among workers, farmers, and the middle class were becoming apparent. In addition, in the wake of cyclical downturns and social dislocation, these theorists argued that practical political engagement offered socialists real opportunities to exert political control over core features of capitalism and, in turn, to mitigate the economic insecurities of workers and a broad spectrum of society. The concrete policy reforms and institutional arrangements that would fundamentally alter the relationship among state, economy, and society in modern Europe were further developed in the early twentieth century by social democratic theorists such as Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man and Swedish social democrats Nils Karleby and Ernst Wigforss.

The second part of the story centers on the political failure of social democracy outside of Scandinavia during the first half of the twentieth century. In Berman's view, there are two causes of the failure. First, while democratic revisionist theorists and practical politicians vigorously challenged orthodoxy, orthodox factions triumphed in France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Electorally successful socialist parties typically rejected opportunities to participate in government, and when they did, they failed to develop and implement significant reform packages that addressed social dislocation, national disintegration, and the turmoil of postwar reconstruction and depression. Second, fascist and national socialist parties developed and aggressively pushed reform programs that palpably addressed these problems. Sharing with social democrats the belief in the primacy of politics, increasingly numerous right-wing socialists and allies in nationalist movements offered mass electorates a program of political control of capitalism: They advocated the use of the state to provide security and employment, to control private property and markets in the interests of the folk, and to restore the national community. Through ballots and brute force, fascism and national socialism defeated orthodox and revisionist socialism as well as liberal democracy in a surprising number of cases.

It was only in Scandinavia before World War II, and in Scandinavia and a yet-limited number of polities elsewhere in the postwar era, that social democracy fully flourished. Emphasizing the political control of capitalism, social democratic governments developed decommodifying welfare states, remarkably equal wage and income distributions, and full employment–oriented economies. Moreover, despite the sporadic social democratic government in many countries, Berman argues, social democratic ideology and policies foundationally influenced the political economies of all of postwar Europe. In effect, extensive nationalization in Italy, indicative planning in France, and generous social provision in Germany and elsewhere all find inspiration in social democracy's prescriptions for reconciling capitalism and democracy—that is, for promoting, through politics, efficiency with equity, material security, and solidarity.

The strengths of Berman's book will be clear to all readers. The argument that the policies and institutions of the bulk of Western Europe represent something more than embedded liberalism is an important one. In addition, her ideational approach to the story is balanced. For the author, ideas and ideology, as well as their carriers in the form of parties and their political and intellectual leaders, are central causal forces in the development of democratic capitalism. Yet Berman is careful to recognize the foundational roles of political economic structure and change and of short-term crises and shocks in creating the demand for ideas and conditioning their development and deployment. Generally, the book offers a rich analysis of the development of democratic revisionism and the ultimate political failures and successes of social democracy. The author's grasp of the historical record surrounding this story is impressive. So, too, is the treatment of frequently ignored thinkers, such as de Man, whose Plan du Travail represents one of the first fully developed programs for a social market economy.

On the other hand, there are two problems with the book. First, over 80% of the material is devoted to the origins and early development of social democracy and to the development and fortunes of national socialism; only the penultimate chapter addresses the post-World War II era and only the concluding chapter addresses social democracy's adaptation to postindustrialization. In both chapters, informed readers will find the analyses of social democracy's political fortunes and policy frameworks underdeveloped. For instance, the fundamentally important shift by many social democratic parties to active social policy is treated in a short paragraph on Blair's “third way” reforms.

Second, and not unrelated to this first criticism, the book tends to accord social democratic parties and ideology near mono-causal status in the construction of Europe's social market economy. There is little discussion, for instance, of the independent and interactive effects of the communitarian Christian Democratic backlash to liberal capitalism. The importance of Christian Democracy in Catholic Europe must be made a bigger part of the story (see Kees van Kersbergen, Social Capitalism, 1995). In addition, while Berman is sensitive to capitalist development and crisis, she largely ignores the formative role of varieties of production and skills regimes, the interests and organization of employers, and the interaction of these forces with social democracy. The relative importance and specific nature of social democracy's role in shaping modern democratic capitalism is incomplete without some additional analyses of these core features of capitalism (see Torben Iversen, Capitalism, Democracy and Welfare, 2005).

All this said, The Primacy of Politics can be strongly recommended to students and scholars of European and comparative politics. It will make for engaging reading in upper-division and graduate classes. And for scholars more generally, it offers a rich account of the evolution of European social democratic ideology in the twentieth century.