PanThe New York Times Book ReviewIsn’t this formula — your globe or your nation? — a little … formulaic? Moyn often sidesteps real politics. He seems little interested in how Sweden’s welfare state was shaped by an innovative Social Democratic Party enacting policies that broadened support for egalitarianism. It wasn’t global. He is disappointed that the Labour Party did not turn construction of a welfare state in postwar Britain into an internationalist project — as if Labour could have persuaded workers to make global economic redistribution an immediate priority rather than, say, a right to health care. Parts of the left, faced with the facts that Marx’s working class was neither homogeneous nor history’s protagonist, substituted for it a romanticized third world. Moyn is, finally, a third worldist ... Might it be possible to interrogate abuses visited on Western workers and victims of colonialism without mythologizing either? ... Moyn leaves socialism undefined, seeming only to envision its global arrival through challenges to equally undefined neoliberalism ... In our rattled times, with Europe’s left in a tailspin and Trump in the White House, with political and social rights besieged, post-utopian egalitarians may need more than globalized third worldism.
