In this chapter, I examine attempts to respond to the scenario of unmitigated capitalism, where the rich continue to get richer. This second possibility focuses on how greater economic equality might be created. I discuss four approaches. First, I explore how taxation can be used to redistribute wealth. Next, I introduce the emerging idea of “degrowth” – the purposeful shrinking of some parts of the economy to protect the environment. Third, I examine communism as a means of pursuing economic equality. Finally, I outline socialism as a fourth path toward building more equal societies. I identify and articulate the strengths and limitations of each approach. These reflections lay the foundation for the third and final possibility.

I present the second master narrative of economic development. I show how capitalism has created wealth and prosperity for many. I present evidence from Our World in Data showing the distribution of this wealth and prosperity, how it has varied over time, and how it is unequally distributed between various global regions. I situate this unequal global rise in inequality within discussions of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whose ideas about capitalism and communism are put in dialogue and placed in historical context. I discuss some of the processes behind this unequal rise in global prosperity, and some of the ways in which poorer countries are poor and how they might escape poverty.

This essay asks if the war and society approach needs reinforcement to fully capture the history of the Cold War. Both within the United States and around the globe, the Cold War was many wars: a theoretical war of nuclear threats; an armed and active conflict; a covert war; and a domestic crusade. Is a war and society framework adequate to describe a conflict of such dimensions? This essay probes the interpretive possibilities of adding a war as society frame to buttress the war and society approach. Focusing on the American Cold War’s geographies (where was it fought?), its warriors (who fought it?), and its timelines (when did it begin, and did it actually end?), I explore the myriad ways in which Americans experienced a multi-front and seemingly permanent war. Policymakers wanted everyone to be drafted into some kind of service for the Cold War, but Americans ultimately rejected that call. They could support a national security state to conduct the war, but they ultimately wanted a healthy distance from the battles. They sought coexistence–war and society–not fusion–war as society.

Chapter 6 uses the insights gleaned from the interviews in Chapter 5 to frame intra-left legal debates over the determinacy of legal reasoning, the significance of legal consciousness and discourse, and the utility of reasoning from the designation “capitalist.”

This chapter explores the history of “total war” in the Republic of China, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Despite not taking part directly in the First World War, Chinese officers, strategists, and political leaders exhibited considerable interest in the notion of “total war” that became popular in its wake. With the full-blown Japanese invasion of 1937, the transnational circulation of strategic ideas gave way to practical concerns about general mobilization for a conflict of unprecedented dimensions and stakes. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime survived the Second World War only to be destroyed by its Chinese Communist opponent, but it continued tapping pre-war ideas and wartime experiences of total war/mobilization to make sense of civil war – and defeat.

‘Football is a like a religion to me’, Pelé once confessed, ‘I worship the ball and treat it like a god.’ This chapter turns the spotlight on an occasion during the Cold War when football and faith clashed head-on – and god lost. It centres on a friendly match in Dublin in 1955 between teams representing Catholic Ireland and Tito’s Yugoslavia. For most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the powerhouse of Eastern European football, renowned for exporting players to the West. Irish sports fans greeted news of the Yugoslavs’ visit with excitement, only for the Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, to spark an almighty row by trying to ban the fixture. McQuaid hated atheistic communism; Tito’s imprisonment of Catholic priests was proof of its evil. In what became a test case for the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat. Despite intense pressure, the Irish Football Association refused to back down and the match went ahead, with Yugoslavia’s great striker Miloš Milutinović bagging a hattrick in a 4–1 win. Ireland lost on the pitch. But through football having put a dent in Catholic authority, many people later claimed the country won off it.

This chapter introduces the reader to the basic structure and history of the international legal system, including the relationship between law and politics and the nature of the international legal order. It is intended to put the reader in a position to understand the role played by international law within the system of international relations. The historical development of international law from its early origins in, for example, the ancient Middle East, through Roman law and the concept of the jus gentium (law of peoples), and the Renaissance to the founders of modern international law, such as Vittoria and Grotius, and onto the nineteenth century and later is surveyed. The chapter refers to the concepts of positivism and naturalism and looks at communist theories of international law in Russia and China. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of the role and position of Developing Countries (Third World; Global South).

The urban and rural collectivization campaign of the Great Leap coincided with a nation-wide debate on the law of value, bourgeois right, and the socialist economy. This chapter demonstrates how what appeared to be an abstract discussion among economists, social scientists, and party theoreticians was in fact intimately connected with and relevant to the praxis of urban collectivization. This was neither the case of a theoretical position or an ideological argument at the top fueling a policy change at the bottom, nor that of a political experiment at the street level which needed to be justified and rearticulated at the level of Marxist theory. Rather, the two aspects – as it often is for Marxist politics – were interdependent, co-determined, and yet always in a state of profound tension. Understanding the Great Leap Forward requires insights into both theoretical abstraction and the world of quotidian praxis.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

Chapter 4 analyzes historical antecedents, crises requiring solutions, and junctures resolving these crises in four case studies. As Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Romania feature key similarities and differences, these countries are both comparable and representative of the diversity of experiences in Eastern Europe. I begin by showing that neither historical antecedents nor kinds of crises were predictive of the balance of political power during key market reform periods, suggesting that postcommunist junctures potentially constituted real turning points in these countries. I then focus on political configurations during junctures. Although Czechia and Romania differed from one another, crucial neoliberal deepening in both was presided over by the reformist Right while the Left led the opposition – a predictable pattern. And whereas Slovakia and Poland were also dissimilar in many ways, leading reformers here behaved contrary to campaign promises by bait-and-switching. By demonstrating that prior developments did not determine political configurations and by emphasizing the role of political agency amid moments of heightened uncertainty during postcommunist junctures, the chapter supports the book’s central argument about the causal relevance of contingency and lays the basis for comparing subsequent developments in the four countries.

During 1917–1918, the trans-European crisis of the war and its ending brought variable patterns of regime instability, popular insurgency, and revolutionary collapse. Most dramatically affected were the defeated countries (Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary), along with Italy, who ended on the winning side disappointingly. After great confrontational divisiveness and civil violence, outcomes varied from successful revolutionary insurrection (Russia), through fraught stabilization within republican-democratic frameworks (Germany, Austria), to violently repressive counter-revolution (Hungary, Italy). In western and northern Europe, victor powers (France, Britain, Belgium) and neutrals (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) underwent versions of democratic strengthening and substantial reform. These outcomes produced new political fields of polarized enmities and mostly fragile consensus that vitally shaped the 1930s.

In his essay on typologies, David Collier urges scholars to “put typologies to work.” This chapter responds by “working with typologies” in synthesizing the rich literature on communist and post-communist regime classifications. The chapter examines several of the descriptive and explanatory typologies that have advanced scholarship on the region, drawing attention to their contributions, as well as missed opportunities for deeper conceptualization and explanation. The analysis includes newly constructed typologies that show how these missed opportunities can be addressed.

As one of the most prolific poets of twentieth-century Hispanic literature, Pablo Neruda’s influence affected diverse cultural and sociopolitical environments. His literary creation and participation in the public sphere led to the poet receiving prizes and awards of both modest and spectacular prestige. While some of Neruda’s awards prompted political controversies that revealed the peculiarities of his character, all of these honors extended his prominence as Chile’s chief poet in the World Republic of Letters. The acquisition of coveted international recognition was, however, of secondary importance to Neruda: His greatest achievement was his own people’s understanding and emotional identification with his poetry.

This essay focuses on Pablo Neruda’s politics as seen in his social and historical poetry, much of it having been published after the end of World War II. It concentrates on two collections: Canto general (1950) and España en el corazón (1937), in which one sees the development of a more pronounced political and historicist agenda. The latter text focuses on Spain and specifically on his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that forced him to take sides with the republicanos and the Marxist cause. Later, after the horrors of World War II, he published Canto general, where the Marxist and communist cause becomes fundamental to his poetry, whether it treats the “liberators” of Latin America throughout the centuries, the segregationist United States, or the Soviet Union. In sum, Neruda progressed in the mid-twentieth century into a profoundly committed political poet.