Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York: Routledge 1990). THESE DAYS IT is HARD TO IMAGINE a less fashionable topic than the future of socialism. Since the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, socialism has been relegated to the dustbins of history, where historians can set about sorting it into monographs without suffering the guilt that always arises when the current relevance of a topic raises suspicions of 'presentism.' Indeed, the universities are now full of political

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... sts and economists who expected to spend their lives in fields like Comparative Communist Systems or Socialist Economies, but who now find themselves plagued by the sense of futility that arises for social scientists when they are reduced to doing what seems like history. Of course there remain a few intransigents, a few commentators who are not convinced that history is over for the socialist project These people persist in thinking that, far from being the remedy for all mat ails us, capitalism is undemocratic, irrational, and exploitative. Such irreconcilables refuse to give up on socialism: they set as their task the critical evaluation of the socialist past; they want to revitalize the rejected tradition; they would like to turn it into something that could put an end to capital's domination of the world. Stephen Eric Bronner fits this mould. Bronner's Socialism Unbound is an effort to throw off what he calls the shackles of teleology, authoritarianism, dogmatism, and opportunism that have led to the current crisis of the socialist movement. Bronner wants to renovate socialism by restoring its dual character as heir to the democracy, egalitarianism, and internationalism of late 18th-century bourgeois radicalism and as a movement committed to the emancipation of labour. For Bronner, socialism's shackles were forged theoretically and then came to hobble practice. In his review of socialist theory from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Luxemburg, Bronner finds plenty to reject. Marx and Engels themselves come off relatively unscathed. Bronner sees them as consistent democrats, egalitarians,