ABSTRACT
The way people see the dilemmas of socialism today depends very much upon their own experience of the history of socialism in this century. For some twenty to thirty years after World War II, socialism, as ideology, as program, as organizational practice, had been to all intents and purposes effectively sidelined from the agendas of social democratic parties throughout Western Europe. The programmatic changes that occurred in a number of social democratic parties in the 1970s were obviously developed with some awareness of these questions, such as the emphasis placed on industrial democracy alongside nationalization and investment controls, or on the decentralized socialization of capital through trade union administered wage earners’ funds. The restructuring of the old socialist parties that produced the new Parti Socialiste certainly yielded a new program and a new discourse. Once established in office, it soon became clear that everything now hinged on the man in the Elysée.
