DONALD SASSOON

Nowhere in interwar Europe did the Communists succeed in establishing a dominant position within the vaster socialist movement. They lost every electoral battle they fought. At best (in Germany in the 1920s and France in the 1930s), they were a minority force of some significance. At worst (in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s), they were pulverized by right-wing authoritarian regimes. By the late 1930s, the international communist movement was in grave danger. Communism was saved by World War II.

The Russian Communists faced a problem older than themselves, a problem that had pervaded their country throughout much of the nineteenth century: modernization. The consciousness of Russia's backwardness obsessed and united the elites.

Democratic politics—that is modern mass politics—is a battlefield in which the most important move is that which decides what the battle is about, what the issue is.

In a mixed economy the public sector remains constrained by the overarching requirement of maintaining an efficient and profitable private sector.

A highly efficient and profitable capitalist system would make possible a welfare state, redistribution of income and greater social opportunities for all..

Logic and politics have little in common. Successful political ideologies and parties have little in common.

In politics, it is difficult to choose one’s friends.

Modern trade unions understood that deciphering a balance sheet was more important than decoding Das Kapital.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

… socialists, along with a motley crowd of professional anti-communists and cold warriors, blindly defended American intervention even as the last CIA agent was boarding the last helicopter out of Saigon in 1975

The problem with foreign policy constraints is that once they are accepted they are seldom questioned again. In the maelstrom of politics, as one limps from crisis to crisis, it is always comforting to have a set of apparently immutable parameters. They remove the need for much agonizing indecision.

In politics, which of two explanations is the “true” one is not quite as important as their respective political implications.

… in the quality and range of women’s higher education, retrograde Tsarist Russia had no peer in Europe, and was second only to the U. S. A. Russian wives could own property, while in ‘advanced’ Victorian Britain, they were entirely propertyless…. The University of Calcutta gave degrees to women in 1883, decades before Oxford and Cambridge.

The women of Finland had been enfranchised in 1906, when their country was a rural backwater of Northern Europe and still a dependency of the Czar.

A woman’s point of view is something which cannot be defined. Women, like men, have different views. No political stance could receive the approval of all women.

Inflation appears to affect the entire electorate, though in reality those able to increase their earnings at the same rate of inflation would not suffer unduly.

Economic prosperity is a great engine for change.

Democracies are much better at adapting to modernization than other systems.

The labor movement was ill-equipped to deal with the new inequalities arising almost inevitably from the less secure, part time and low paid nature of women’s occupations.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

Wealth may not necessarily be the decisive element in the progress of women, but it does create the conditions for further emancipation and equality.

In most countries, class, education, religion, and regions are better predictors of voting behavior than sex.

Not many people appear to advocate—although most a quite prepared to tolerate—a society where some people are worth less than others.

When capitalism changes, so must socialism.