Few will now be inclined to dispute that the peaceful transition to socialism within capitalist democracies will be at best a hard and obstructed road. But few also, even amongst the more sanguine of revolutionary socialists, would now care to argue in the light of twentieth-century experience that violent revolution, whatever the prospects for its occurrence, is particularly likely to leave in its wake a peaceful, democratic and prosperous socialist society. In politics what is likely to happen is more important than what just conceivably might.

How then, except by the most blatant and strenuous self-deception, does any serious modern observer of politics contrive to remain a socialist? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that the more perceptive and scrupulous of modern socialists remain socialists, increasingly, by dint of confining their intellectual attention more and more firmly to the first two aspects of a political theory (the analysis of existing societies and the theory of social and political goods) at the expense of its third aspect (the analysis of how what exists can be sustained or improved and how social and political goods can in practice be realized). Modern socialism, that is to say, is far from utopian in its negative motivation, in that it bases itself on extensive and sometimes extremely penetrating assessment of capitalist societies as these are. But it is increasingly utopian, not in its stress on the intrinsically desirable, but in its fitful and perfunctory attention to the causal problems of assessing how far this is genuinely realizable even in principle, and how precisely it could in fact be realized in practice.