Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Description: Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same re...