Writing in 1997, Tony Judt warned his readers that “the present afflictions of the European left are more than passing concern. And they are serious”.Footnote ¹ Since the fall of communism and, even earlier, the 1980s neoliberal revolution, the decline of the Left has remained a major concern for left-wing authors. Shlomo Sand’s A Brief Global History of the Left is the latest contribution to this genre of literature. He begins by situating himself “at a time when organized leftist movements around the world are in serious decline” and writes about the Left as “increasingly old and tired: its ideological arms tremble as it tries to grasp the future” (p. 3). Although meant as statements of fact and indicators of the problem to be examined, these opening lines may be read as an anticipation of the book’s “melancholy conclusion” about the fate of the Left in the post-pandemic world (pp. 251–264). Sand toys with the idea of framing his book as one of those owls of Minerva that spread their wings only when the subject of their wisdom is on its deathbed. He claims to be uncertain about this, though, and assures the reader he is not in a hurry to “bury the Left”. He even ends the book with a vaguely defiant Galileo’s “and yet it moves!” (p. 264). Nevertheless, the book has little to say in terms of what can be retained or learned from a history of the Left and what course of action one may consider pursuing if one wants to continue being a leftist. The book reads like a requiem for Sand’s own leftism, and the overgeneralized diagnosis of his contemporaries – that the Left lost its “mystique” for them (p. 262) – sounds like an admission of a melancholiac: for them, according to Freud, “[t]he object has not perhaps actually died, but it has been lost as an object of love”.Footnote ²

Sand’s book is hard to classify in terms of its genre and intended audience. Deprived of all references, it is still rather long and academic in tone for a merely commercial product. It is not a primer with an extensive and well-referenced literature survey and its “further readings” sections. Nor is it exactly Yuval Harari-style popular scholarship, which is not devoid of references either. Probably based on Professor Sand’s lecture series, the book reads like a superlong “long read”, yet one that shuts down rather than opens up a conversation. After all, if most of what is left from the Left is its past, and its history does not offer many leads to what one might do or even read further, the only thing one is left with is a desperate mourning for the near-dead.

Though the design of the book might be its publisher’s responsibility, the structure of the narrative is the author’s, and it is not particularly original. Like most academic and popular (e.g. Wikipedia) exposés on the history of socialism or the Left, Shlomo Sand’s book is organized chronologically (except for a chapter on gender equality, which covers almost three centuries). After defining the Left as an embodiment of what he argues to be a distinctively modern myth of equality (pp. 4–10), Sand goes on to discuss the immediate precursors of the Left, the seventeenth-century English Diggers and Levellers, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The author then proceeds to the French Revolution, where he focuses on the radicalization of the egalitarian message first by the Jacobins and then by Gracchus Babeuf’s “conspiracy of equals” (pp. 24–36). In the following three chapters, Sand glides through almost exclusively French and, in part, British intellectual currents, from “utopian socialism” to anarchism operative in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (p. 49). Here, he introduces the distinction between the authoritarian and the democratic Left. While many other differentials – statism vs self-management, centralism vs federalism, violent vs peaceful transition to a more just society – also feature in Sand’s discussion, the conflict between these two major trends within the Left is the guiding motif of his whole narrative.

In Chapters Six and Seven, the author submits Karl Marx and Marxism to rather extensive critical analysis and examines their impact on the social democratic and labour movement in the late nineteenth century. Strangely limited almost exclusively to The Communist Manifesto, Sand’s narrative contains several thoughtful as well as banal and problematic observations. For instance, he makes insightful comments about the deficiencies of Marx’s idea of the proletariat as an agent of change; repeats well-known criticisms of Marx’s class theory and his socialism’s scientific claims; and makes questionable generalizations about Marx’s failure to analyse political representation and having “no serious awareness of the ecological consequences of industrialization” (p. 80).Footnote ³ Sand’s anti-Marxism may help to account for his choice of equality and not capitalism as the defining feature of the Left.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, even though he demonstrates a cursory awareness of Marx’s critique of the bourgeois character of “equal right” and “equal standard”, he does not question Marx’s Leftism, even if he characterizes it as “authoritarian” (pp. 73–83).Footnote ⁵

Russian Bolshevism and Stalinism, as well as European fascism and Chinese communism, are discussed in the following three chapters. In the case of fascism, Sand is especially at pains to demonstrate the pro-capitalist and hence right-wing character of the fascist movements. This argument, though sensible, is rather inconsistent with Sand’s refusal to define the Left via capitalism. Furthermore, based on the cases of Stalinism, Maoism, and a variety of postcolonial regimes, he develops what he claims to be an original hypothesis on the trajectory of the non-Western Left and the reasons why, at least in the twentieth century, it tended to assume a statist and authoritarian character, emulate the Soviet model, and deprive local democratic alternatives of any chances. The core of Sand’s essentially culturalist thesis is the longue durée persistence of such local social and cultural traditions as Russian serfdom and Chinese “oriental despotism” (pp. 129–133 and 159–160).

The following three chapters examine the postwar consensus around the welfare state, temporary social-democratic hegemony in the Western world, and civil rights, antiwar, and student movements around the globe in the 1960s. According to Sand, the 1960s were the high point in what Martin Luther King might have referred to as the moral arc of human history that bends toward equality and social justice. He posits that this is also the beginning of the downward curve of this arc, when the Global Left started to splinter into a variety of identity-based discourses and movements, and the very concept of equality, along with freedom and fraternity, began to be rejected not only as “bourgeois” but also “white” and “Western” (p. 202).

This fragmentation is further traced through the book’s extensive discussions of neoliberalism, populism, and ecology. Sand describes how neoliberal globalization undermines the democratic state and the working class, the pillars of post-war social democracy. Just as in the chapter on fascism, he is at pains to differentiate between the Left and any form of populism, including Left-wing populism, arguing that populism – with its supposedly inherent irrationalism and its tendency to manipulate déclassé masses – is taking over (Chapter Eighteen).Footnote ⁶ Even when he touches on such hopeful currents as environmentalism, degrowth, anti-work, and demands for a basic income, Sand tends to dismiss them as marginal or prone to be “seduced” by the bourgeois consumerist “society of spectacle” (pp. 245–247).

In his avowedly “melancholic” conclusion, written in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, Shlomo Sand surveys the contemporary world full of uncertainty and insecurity, unfulfilled promises and crumbling solidarities, growing inequalities (especially within the Global Core), and a “hollow” anti-systemic revolt devoid of any sense of future (pp. 258–259). He concludes that what his contemporaries are largely doing is “groping in the dark” (p. 262). This brings him back to his initial “hypothesis” that purports to explain “the disarray of leftist movements” by demonstrating “a crisis of the various components of the myth of equality” (p. 10). The book is revealed to be a catalogue of such crises: “The fact that people are turning away from the left is a sign of a regression in the imaginary of equality, and the reticence the concept now arouses” (p. 261).

None of this is untrue, and most of Sand’s summaries and conclusions are based on very good, albeit unreferenced – and often unacknowledged – literature. Yet, filtered through the lens of “left-wing melancholy”, Shlomo Sand’s history paradoxically resembles the very Whig historiography he critiques elsewhere.Footnote ⁷ It reflects an approach to history that projects the concerns of the present backward onto the past. Such historical narratives celebrate the present as a culmination of the past. Consider, for instance, official Soviet accounts of the Left in which “scientific communism” triumphs over its “utopian” precursors and “revisionist” opponents. However, even a narrative of decline, or the waxing and waning of equality, can fall into this same pattern. Despite his efforts to introduce nuance and ambiguity, Sand ultimately constructs such a Whig history of imminent decline.

This need not have been the case. The Left, as a highly diverse intellectual tradition, contains a rich legacy that “clashes with the synchronizing violence of dominant modernity”, including the violence inherent in linear historical narratives.Footnote ⁸ Rather than seeking to restore order or lament past defeats, we can see the past as a rich repository of voices that have not been heard, hopes that have gone unrealized, and freedom demands that have been suppressed. Such an understanding of history highlights what is lacking in the present and calls for completion. In this sense, the past is not merely what has already occurred but also what was never allowed to happen, pointing toward future possibilities. A genuinely leftist imagination engages the past as an archive of repressed or forsaken emancipatory struggles, which continue to resonate in the present, demanding fulfilment and guiding us toward the future.

Thus conceived, “history” implies a strategy for defining the Left that stands in contrast to Sand’s politically centrist, if not conservative, approach – one that echoes Pierre Rosanvallon’s centrist genealogy of equality.Footnote ⁹ These alternative frameworks are well-established, yet, curiously, Sand fails to address them. For instance, Karl Mannheim and Leszek Kołakowski distinguish between the Left and Right by referring to the difference between utopia and ideology – between ideas that transform social reality and those that distort and justify it. Kołakowski advances this argument, highlighting the “necessity” of utopias for fostering social change and giving it meaning.Footnote ¹⁰

More recently, sociologist Erik Olin Wright has reminded us that “utopia” applies not only to ideas, but also to practices. In his “real utopias” project, Wright documents a broad spectrum of historical and ongoing experiments aimed at organizing social life around the prospects of human flourishing rather than measurable indicators such as profits or what Marx termed “bourgeois equal right”.Footnote ¹¹

In sum, rethinking utopia offers a potential solution to overcoming any form of melancholia, including Sand’s left-wing melancholy. Far from being naïve, premature, or inherently totalitarian, utopias may represent a genuinely Leftist antidote to the degeneration of social critique and anti-system movements into pure negativity, doctrinaire fanaticism, technocratic managerialism, or nostalgic conservatism. Another “global history of the Left” is not only possible but urgently needed!