166 foreign affairs
JAMES E. CRONIN is Professor of History at
Boston College.
When Progressives
Were on the March
The Postwar Era’s Lessons
for the Left
James E. Cronin
The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces
in Britain, France, and the United States
After World War II
BY ISSER WOLOCH. Yale University
Press, 2019, 560 pp.
T
he rise of illiberal politics around
the world is generating under-
standable anxiety over the future
of the liberal international order. Most of
that concern focuses on the fate of the
international institutions that Washington
and its allies created after World War II
to promote peace and economic openness
and to ward off the return of the protec-
tionist, nationalist, and imperialist ideas
that had produced so much bloodshed in
the first half of the twentieth century.
But equally important to the liberal order
are the domestic policies and programs
that accompanied these international
arrangements. These involved a redesign
of capitalism, with states balancing
markets in order to ensure full (or at least
fuller) employment and constructing
comprehensive systems of social welfare.
Historians have described these changes
in various ways: a Keynesian compro-
mise, a social democratic settlement,
embedded liberalism. Whatever one calls
them, the domestic changes that took
place in Western countries after the war
were essential for the emergence of the
international order, because they made it
possible to build and maintain political
support for that order.
Isser Woloch’s masterly account tells
this story by focusing on what he terms
the “progressive forces”—coalitions made
up of parties of the left and center-left
and the unions allied with them—that
struggled to create societies where capital
was constrained, workers and unions
empowered, and governments mandated
to ensure economic and social security.
What Woloch calls “the postwar moment”
was marked by an unusual degree of
consensus and cooperation within and
between these coalitions and by the
strength of the trade unions at their core.
By the early 1950s, the momentum of the
immediate postwar years had faded, and
the strength of these progressive forces
had begun to wane. But even then, there
was little to no rollback: the achievements
of the postwar moment became more or
less permanent features of the political
and institutional landscape in France, the
United Kingdom, and the United States.
Woloch’s book tells a compelling tale of
weak and frequently divided parties on
the left (and their allies in trade unions)
gaining strength and coherence in re-
sponse to the Great Depression, the rise
of fascism, and World War II. The book
also implicitly reminds readers that many
of the conditions that helped produce
the postwar moment are absent today.
Those wishing for a resurgence of progres-
sivism must therefore place their hopes
on a wholly different set of driving forces.