In October 1998, flush with victory after Tony Blair’s triumph in the previous year’s elections, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens published his now famous manifesto, The Third Way. In just over 150 pages, the volume announced to the world a new political faith.

Appearing in an era when the spirits of socialism and communism still haunted the Left, Giddens’s call for a “renewal of social democracy” was meant to close the book on the past and begin a new chapter in the history of social progress. Everything was new — the new economy, New Labour, New Democrats, the New Middle.

In reality, it was all a rather post-hoc affair. The electoral left had been adapting itself to the neoliberal world of free markets and privatization for years already, but a unified, transnational ideological narrative for the reorientation had been missing.