Impasse & Breakthrough – in Sweden

The onset of stagflation in the ’70s has stimulated attacks on the welfare state and its chief proponent, social democracy. The right-wing attack has sought to link causally social democracy’s program—redistribution through public-sector expansion—to the economic problems suffered by the West.’ Left critics, among them Alan Wolfe, credit the success of postwar capitalism to social democratic management, while attributing the current decline of capitalism to its inability...