TY - BOOK AU - Niemietz,Kristian TI - Socialism: the failed idea that never dies SN - 9780255367714 AV - HX73 .N54 2019 U1 - 335 23 PY - 2019/// CY - London PB - Institute of Economic Affairs, in association with London Publishing Partnership Ltd KW - Socialism KW - History KW - POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism & Socialism KW - bisacsh KW - Electronic books N1 - Includes bibliographical references N2 - Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism's adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were "real socialism". This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as "not real socialism" UR - https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2012624 ER -