Socialism: A Very Short Iintroduction
By Michael Newman
Oxford University Press, £8.99

Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series provides exactly that: brief but comprehensive coverage of the topic under consideration.  These guides provide excellent resources for students – and indeed for anyone who wants to gain a critical overview of the area in question.

Michael Newman’s Socialism: A Very Short Introduction offers precisely this type of initiation to the study of socialism - this fully updated and revised version explaining the history of socialist ideas and their relevance for today and tomorrow.

The coverage is comprehensive despite the book’s deceptively small size. Having defined socialism, the discussion moves on to outline the main current of socialist thought, from the utopian socialists, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier through to anarchist traditions and on to Marx and Engels and subsequent debates within Marxism.