There are few topics as difficult to write well about, given the last fifty years of world history, than Third International Communism. For nearly two generations now, Third International communist parties have, on the one hand, been the repositories of the most intense hopes of progressives and, on the other hand, the objects of the most extreme fears of conservatives. Add to this the emotional atmosphere the events of Stalinism, the ebb and flow of world revolutionary trends, the ideological lunacy of the Cold War and, most recently, the development of strident divisions in the world Marxist movement, and the intellectual and interpretive problems facing any author trying to make sense of a Western communist party become truly formidable.