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Contemporary Approaches to Social Democracy: Old Wines in New Bottles

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Notes

  1. This overlap can be illustrated by ‘googling’ various central terms, like ‘Social Democracy’–Welfare State–Revisionism–Reformism, separately or together. This leads to the following ‘hitlist’:Social Democracy and Welfare State=36,200Social Democracy and Revisionism and Reformism: 9,000Theory of Social Democracy : 35,600 Obviously Reformism and Revisionism are not popular terms any more, whereas it is striking to observe that the other combinations mentioned do equally well. Apparently for social scientists the marriage between Social Democracy and the Welfare State is self-evident and that writing on Social Democracy is considered almost always as being conducive to theory formation of a kind!

  2. To some extent this teleological bias explains the, seemingly endless debate about ‘true’ and ‘false’ conceptions of a socialist strategy during the 1980s and the extent to which the use of certain means (like violence or suspending ‘human rights’) are justified by the final goal (see e.g. Gorz, 1967). This type of ‘radicalism’ appears to be something of the past now.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Free University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, The Netherlands

    Hans Keman

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Keman, H. Contemporary Approaches to Social Democracy: Old Wines in New Bottles. Eur Polit Sci 7, 494–506 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2008.42

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