It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States

It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. New York: W W Norton Press, 2000. 379 pp. Tables, notes, index. Cloth, $26.95. ISBN 0-393-04098-4.

Reviewed by Warren van Tine

Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, two doyens of political sociology, have coauthored an important study that immediately goes on the required reading list for my graduate students. It Didn't Happen Here explores a question that has haunted commentators on American society for the past century: "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" To answer this question of American exceptionalism, observers from Werner Sombart and Frederick …