Constraints and Limitations

Is Socialism Doomed? is an elegant analysis of the experience of the French left in power after 1981. The general reader will learn much about France and its left from the book. Singer combines two rare qualities—a compelling writing style and a resolutely leftist viewpoint. Is Socialism Doomed? is a pleasure to read—and it’s also powerfully controversial. In 300 pages Daniel Singer can find very little good to say about the years of Mitterrand in power in France.

Singer starts with the context needed to understand what the left did after François Mitterrand’s election to the presidency in May 1981. Leaving the sleepy stodginess of empire behind in the 1950s, France rapidly became a full-fledged modern capitalist society, only to face new years of “crisis” after the postwar boom collapsed in the mid-1970s. In this complex transition virtually everything, including the French constitution, changed. France’s schismatic left chang...