With Jeremy Corbyn having now departed from the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, the postmortems have begun in earnest. For bien-pensant liberal and conservative pundits — a ubiquitous presence in the British media — Corbynism could only ever have ended in a historic election defeat. Such accounts usually erase the memory of the 2017 general election, when, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour came close to unseating the Conservatives on an ambitious left-of-center manifesto.

But with Labour having now lost four consecutive general elections in a decade, under party leaders from its right, center, and left wings respectively, it’s clear that more fundamental factors underlie the party’s current crisis.

Searching for Socialism, a fresh study of Labour’s New Left by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, thankfully provides the kind of historical context so commonly absent from mainstream discussion. A follow-up to their earlier volume, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, the book condenses and reprises the thesis of its predecessor, while taking stock of the turbulent Corbyn era and Labour’s heavy loss in December’s general election.