I have rather deliberately chosen this somewhat unorthodox title, keeping in mind the late P. N. Haksar's abiding interest in socialism, Marxism in particular. He died in 1998 with a feeling of deep anguish, as the world turned virtually upside down after the fall of the Soviet Union. This paper is an attempt to understand what went wrong with socialism in the twentieth century, an age marked by pluralism and increasing diversification of knowledge. The central argument of the paper is that, notwithstanding socialism's compatibility with pluralism in its original vision, socialism failed because of its inability to negotiate the question of pluralism. In a way this is a tribute to the late Haksar too, who himself possessed a creative mind with a pluralist temperament.

The collapse of socialism as a practice in the last decade of the twentieth century has evoked two major yet contradictory explanations. First, socialism failed, because, following the advent of perestroika and glasnost under Gorbachev, it was infected with the virus of pluralism, the beginning of which was made supposedly by Khrushchev in the 20th Congress in 1956. Second, socialism's failure is attributed to the fact that it was not sufficiently pluralist, notwithstanding Gorbachev's efforts to democratize the Soviet system. In fact, in the last days of the Gorbachev era, these two opposite positions were represented by Nina Andreyeva and Boris Yeltsin respectively. While the first position is generally considered Stalinist, the second position is an advocacy for liberalism.