Intellectuals and Socialism: 'Social Democrats' and the British Labour Party

This study is concerned with the role of intellectuals in left-wing parties, focusing on the case of the social democratic intellectuals in the Labour Party. It suggests that at the core of Labour's paralysis lies the fact that Labour still lacks a coherent strategy, and that it has failed to resolve the ambiguities about its identity and ideology which have plagued it over more than two decades, and which were at the root of the SDP split. The disintegration of the SDP project in the last decade only serves to underline one of the basic propositions of the book - that the SDP was the terminal manifestation of a particular intellectual project, rooted in the Labour Party rather than the "mould breaking" beginning it was presented (and accepted) as being.