The idea for this book was prompted by a reviewer's critical comment on a previous work, Political Economy and the Labour Party, that it lacked a conclusion assessing the contemporary state of British democratic socialist political economy. The point was well made. That volume was indeed innocent of an evaluative finale. In a sense, therefore, this work is the concluding chapter that the reviewer demanded: an attempt to furnish a critical and evaluative history of the political economy of fin de siècle British democratic socialism.

It does so by reviewing the emergence and demise of the different genres of democratic socialist political economy that have traversed the ideological firmament in the period since 1979. My trope is that of tragedy. For I argue that what we have seen in the two decades covered by the book is a desperate, frenetic and ultimately futile attempt on the part of democratic socialists to reconfigure the political economy of democratic socialism in a form that would enable it to survive and deliver in an increasingly hostile material and ideological environment – one shaped by the ideas of the New Right, the increasing globalization of economic activity, the triumph of possessive individualism and the uncritical celebration of the virtues of private as against social consumption.

The intellectual energy expended on this reconfiguration has been formidable. But the shelf-lives of the political economies it has furnished have been short.