In the first main article on this theme, Stefan Berger deftly explores the rival claims of communists and social democrats as political movements of the left; he also suggests that beneath this dichotomy was a shared tendency to neglect issues of democracy, as opposed to social and economic reform.

An issue of wide significance in twentieth-century politics is the relationship between social democracy and liberalism. Andrew Thorpe examines the relationship between the Labour and Liberal parties in Britain between the wars and suggests that retrospective counterfactuals as to a possible broad centre-left ignore a host of deep-seated tensions.

Aad Blok's article on the leading Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen gives us insight into the cultural and intellectual influences on an 'expert-intellectual' whose principal agency of reform was the state and whose measure of economic order was efficiency.

Also in this issue, Donald Sassoon, in an interview with Willie Thompson, reflects on social democracy in the context of his own practice as a historian 'without manifestoes'; while in Forum, the theme of New Labour and its inheritance is explored from two different and stimulating perspectives by Robert Taylor and Mark Bevir.