Everyone’s story is an interesting whole in its own right, and this book is what Tom has made of his – but it also captures the rich political history of the past six decades. The German student movement, Berkeley radicalism, the Whitlam sacking, the Portuguese and Nicaraguan Revolutions, the Lebanese civil war, dissidence in the Eastern bloc, labour struggles in South Korea, the fall of Suharto – many such episodes are told as eyewitness accounts, amid Tom’s reflections on building the International Socialist tradition in Australia.

François Hollande’s five year term as president of France was more than underwhelming, which largely explains why the recent election has seen France’s Socialist Party wiped off the electoral map. During a period of high unemployment, Hollande’s government conducted an aggressive winding back of the country’s labour code, at the same time as slashing funding to hospitals and healthcare. To Australian audiences, this kind of neoliberal renovation probably sounds awfully familiar.

A philosopher outside of the norm, politics, in Bensaïd, becomes something more than an affaire of immediate action. To make politics an affaire of immediate action meant to give in to the fragmentation of political action without a universal horizon of emancipation. Radical politics needs a horizon through which all thought is directly or indirectly tied.