Mention Weber, Polanyi, Moore, or Hirschman, and I think illuminations. Joining intellect and scholarship, they conjured up visions of probable worlds—worlds of social relations and institutional arrangements that were neither foreordained nor random, and could come into full being only through the crucible of politics.

From Weber to Hirschman, theirs was a grand intellectual and scholarly tradition that fashionable minimalists would later neglect, even disdain. And theirs is the tradition to which Berman’s books— first The Social Democratic Moment, now The Primacy of Politics—belong. While many in the profession put on displays of technical proficiency, Berman is bringing the intellect back into political science.

She is also bringing back the “moment.” And she’s doing it judiciously. In my reading of The Primacy, Berman does not dispute that the ideational and institutional scaffoldings of European political democracy were constructed through protracted and complex processes—not just treatises based on thought experiments but treaties based on princely contestations were involved. In Berman’s gripping narrative, in fact, these scaffoldings helped sustain the social democrats as they faced a series of choices, each more difficult than the previous.

For Berman, the democratic revisionists’ blows to Marxist orthodoxy and the socialists’ growing appreciation for the art of the possible helped set the stage for a struggle between incipient social democracy and its own probable alternatives. Communitarian concerns and a deep faith in the political, after all, animated fascism as well, just like the impulse to approach economic relations in an all-or-nothing spirit was a hallmark trait of radical liberalism.

Through a blend of conviction, foresight, determination, and coalitional skill, social democrats opened up their own distinctive path to a more noble probable future, even if still overshadowed in the interwar period by its crass and noxious rivals. Sweden was the paradigm of principled pragmatism. Social democrats elsewhere recognized the great power of market capitalism (to generate wealth and devastate communities) and the even greater power of politics (to tame the market’s destructive excesses and foment its benefits). They also resolved to harness the latter democratically. What a moment.

This story played out with varying outcomes across Western Europe, from the Scandinavian periphery to the German core to the Italian peninsula. Not much later, on this side of the Atlantic, in the marginal coffee-growing country of Costa Rica, a small group of intellectuals/political leaders created a think-tank which, through astute institutional mergers, they transformed into a political party dedicated to the proposition that their country must repudiate fascism, communism, and unrestrained capitalism. These self-proclaimed revolutionaries did resort to violence, but in a clash so limited in time and scope that seriously violent neighboring countries derided it as a “tiny little war”. Moreover, once this brief war was settled in their favor, the revolutionaries unrelentingly pursued socioeconomic reformism in particular and principled pragmatism more broadly. They built an exceptional order that remains to this day unparalleled in the region.

Most accounts of this tropical variant of social democracy have hinged on the primacy of economics. And most students of political and economic development in the region have almost blindly subscribed to these accounts. Once again, misunderstood.

As Latin America grapples with unsatisfactory models and the challenges of globalization, few, if any, look to the Costa Rican social democratic chapter for insight. Lately, not even the Costa Ricans themselves do. Once again, forgotten.

So, why do we misunderstand and forget our usable pasts?

Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal suggest that it was more stable than you suggest.

Also, the basic material-structural fact of the oligopolist concentration of industry, with its inability to stabilize its input/output requirements in the face of the larger society in which it was dominantly embedded, which neither classical liberalism, nor social-democratic corporatist bargaining could quite acknowledge and fully come to terms with, seems to me to have been a larger determinant of the situation than any play of ideas.