The World After Communism: A Polemic for Our Times

The collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s was hailed as a triumph for freedom, but initial euphoria soon turned to a mixture of pessimism and regret. The demise of the established Cold War structures threatened to unleash pandemonium on the world, while the passing of socialism seemed to leave money-making and ethnic violence as the only competitors for the future.In this trenchant polemic Robert Skidelsky reasserts the need for optimism. The collapse of communism, he argues, is the most hopeful event to have happened in the twentieth century, not least by reviving the liberal promise shattered by the first world war. In a fascinating essay in historical interpretation, he links the collapse of communism to the global failure of collectivism. He identifies collectivism - the doctrine that the state knows best - as the twentieth century's most egregious error, and shows how it created the pathologies from which we are now trying to extricate ourselves.Robert Skidelsky has written a book on political economy which challenges liberal statesmanship to overcome the dangers and seize the opportunities afforded by the end of communism. The task, as he sees it, is not just to navigate expertly in the years ahead, but to develop a 'constitution of liberty' for entrenching the post-collectivist order. Unless that is done, the promise opened up by the fall of communism will fade away. The World After Communism makes an important contribution to understanding the nature of that task.