{"product_id":"politics-for-a-rational-left","title":"Politics for a Rational Left","description":"In this book, Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain's most distinguished historians, tackles the current impasse of the left. In a series of cogent and elegant contributions he elaborates a strategy for the defeat of Thatcherism and the opening of a new era of progressive and democratic politics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHobsbawm situates the left's recent difficulties within a longer historical perspective: the epochal crisis of the 'classic labour movement' created by new patterns of urbanization and post-industrial economics. He argues that in Britain this crisis has been exacerbated by a factionalism which obstructs the creation of rational alliances, and by an insularity which blinds the left to valuable lessons from elsewhere in Europe. Unity of the left, around a broad and imaginative programme including major reform of the electoral system, is the only effective response to a Conservative government which has made a radical break with the post-war consensus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePolitics for a Rational Left \u003c\/i\u003esets Hobsbawm's influential political analyses in the context of more discursive contributions ranging over themes such as working-class organization in the modern city, the appeal of nationalism in contemporary society, the lessons of the pre-war Popular Front, and his own formative political experience. Hobsbawm emerges from these pages as a hard-headed and lucid political commentator whose dismissal of wishful thinking and party chauvinism never deflects from an underlying commitment to the relevance of socialism for the 1990s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished in association with Marxism Today \u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Verso Books","offers":[{"title":"paperback","offer_id":50192209084693,"sku":"amz1789934546431","price":16.27,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0878\/5349\/8645\/files\/politics-for-a-rational-left_1.jpg?v=1789934550","url":"https:\/\/zenmatfitk.shop\/products\/politics-for-a-rational-left","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}