Excerpt

In his essay “Thoughts on Capitalism and Socialism,” Martin Sklar proposes a particular way of understanding the patterns of thought that have animated social and political struggles in capitalist societies since the mid-nineteenth century.¹ This analysis enables Sklar to offer empirical diagnoses of the thinking of important historical figures in strikingly novel ways: Lenin, for example, is a “right-wing utopian pro-socialist,” while Jane Addams and Eduard Bernstein are “left-wing realistic pro-socialists,” and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are “left-wing realistic procapitalists.” This is a nuanced and deeply insightful way of mapping the complexity of variations in ideological configurations.

As a…