ABSTRACT
Seymour Martin Lipset’s and Gary Marks’ It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States represents his most recent and most substantial entry in his now fifty-year-old effort to understand why socialism failed in the United States, while it succeeded, in the sense of creating mass parties, with opportunities to govern, in the other major industrial societies and English-speaking democracies. (Since I am discussing this book in the context of a discussion of Lipset’s involvement with this problem through his entire professional life, I hope Gary Marks will forgive me if I use the shorthand referring to the book as Lipset’s, with the understanding that of course Marks is a full co-author. There is no indication in the book how the responsibility, for research and writing, was divided.) The book conveniently lists all of Lipset’s other books, and we can see that from the beginning the failure of socialism has been a central issue, perhaps the central issue, in his intellectual life.
