Bauman, in particular, is a key influence for Beilharz, and there are two fine essays devoted to his thought. Like Bauman, Beilharz thinks that utopian thinking is an inevitable feature of modernity. ‘Utopia is a ubiquitous presence in the lives of moderns’, arising from the self-reflexive nature of the modern consciousness. The inevitability of change and of open possibilities is part of what it is to be modern, or at least postmodern. But as Beilharz interprets Bauman, the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is one of mood and strategy, rather than history or sociology. The modern intellectual is typically a legislator or social engineer who aims at control, prediction, and scientific mastery. The ‘postmodern’ intellectual is, rather, a translator whose approach is hermeneutic and whose aim is to keep alive possible futures. So a postmodern socialism à la Baumann is pluralistic and imaginary – ‘a necessary no place, rather than (as per Bolshevism) … an image of a world to be achieved, now, whatever the cost’. Utopias are both necessary and dangerous. Without them critique is not possible, but when they come to power, when they move from imagination to history, from dreams to reality, they invariably sour.

Beilharz’s aim here is as much about recovering the original, ironic understanding of the word utopia as it is about exploring the diversity of the socialist past and present. Readers of Thomas More’s classic will recall the thoroughly paradoxical and satirical nature of this work, which explores, but leaves unanswered, the question concerning the relationship between philosophical truth and power. More’s Utopia (1516) can perhaps be understood to relate to the postmodern mood as that other fictional island, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), does to the modern. The latter is the land of scientific mastery and technological control, where a monological conception of truth both justifies and is implemented through political power. It is the prototype of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism and, in a milder but no less mistakable form, the social planning of mid twentieth-century Western democracies.

Included in this collection are three essays on Australian labour written in the mid to late 1980s, which are valuable for the way they tie local developments to a broader theoretical frame. Beilharz makes a convincing case that the labourist tradition in Australia largely grew from an amalgam of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century new liberalism and Fabianism, and that, being the ‘unwitting bearer’ of liberalism, Australian labourism ought to be distinguished from social democracy in its full-blooded European sense. Though it is probably too early to make definitive judgements on Kevin Rudd’s contribution to Australian labourism or to the social democratic tradition he invokes, some reflections on these themes would have helped Beilharz bring the Australian dimension of the collection into the present.

Another limitation worth mentioning is that there is no discussion of religion in this collection. Of course, one of the advantages of the essay form is that not all threads have to be tied together and Beilharz does not promise more than he can deliver, but if we are going to move from capitalism to modernity, ideas such as secularisation must be considered. And if socialism is the other of capitalist modernity, religion, or at least religious fundamentalism, is the other of secularisation. This point is significant: first, because religious fundamentalism has recently resurfaced as one important source of modern utopian thinking of a decidedly non-ironic kind; and second, as John Gray has recently argued, modern political utopias such as Marxism, as well as the more recent Hayekian utopia of neoliberalism, have deep religious roots that draw on the apocalyptic strain in Western history. Beilharz’s silence on this issue left me unsure whether he subscribed to some or other version of the secularisation thesis, or whether he thought it was too big a topic to do justice to in a collection such as this.

The final essay in the collection surveys some of the literature addressing the question as to why there is (apparently) no socialism in the United States. It ends on an ironic note suggesting that the question was always ill-conceived, not only because there have in fact been socialists in the United States, but also because it assumes that the socialist desire ‘is built into history as necessity. Socialism remains a necessary utopia.’ Though Beilharz does not mention him, I was reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr, that great American socialist with a deep sense of the irony of history. Niebuhr also recognised that socialism was the inevitable ‘other’ of capitalism, as well as the dangers of good intentions gone wrong. Late in his life, Niebuhr stopped calling himself a socialist and became something of an ironic or chastened liberal. Beilharz rejects such a position, suggesting that liberalism will never be adequate to our needs because it has an insufficiently socialised conception of the individual and that, even within social liberalism, ‘the reductio ad absurdum implied by state and citizen is always present’. Here, Beilharz sidelines traditions of liberal thought – such as that represent-ed by Hegel and the British idealists – that contain resources able to meet his concerns. But even leaving this criticism to one side, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Beilharz’s socialist vision is, like Niebuhr’s, a quixotic one – both a necessary outcome of liberal modernity, yet incapable of escaping its constraints.