What political theory attempts to grasp is, as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘what is going on, what is really happening in society’. This essay is concerned with the political theory of socialism: with what has really been happening in the emergence, the protracted advance and the recent faltering of socialist politics. It considers this question principally in relation to the experience of the wealthier and more advanced capitalist countries of Europe, America, the Antipodes and the Far East, assuming, with Marx, that the superiority of socialist civilization, if it is to be established at all, must be so by its greater capacity to resolve the practical problems of those societies which are materially the most advanced.

There are three demands which it is reasonable to make of a political theory: the first is that it should capture what political structures, political institutions and political relations are actually like at present – what they consist in, what they prevent and what they bring about (the simplest understanding of Taylor's formula). The second is that it should capture our sense of how we might coherently and justifiably desire any human society to be. The third is that it should tell us what is to be done to realize in practice as intrinsically desirable a social and political condition as can in fact be realized and sustained in the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves.