With the recent collapse of so much that formed socialist expectations in the twentieth century, and yet at the same time with a global capitalist order which is full of severe, massive and urgent problems, we live in a period of great political confusion. In such a period it is inevitable that nostrums are advanced both on the Right and on the Left which are incapable of tackling seriously the problems they are supposed to resolve. We conceived this volume as addressing a broad range of 'dead-end' or 'morbid symptom' responses to various aspects of the current global disorder, offering analyses of why they arise as well as a critique and corrective to them. We deliberately cast our net widely: the essays in this volume highlight important aspects of our theme in relation to environmentalism, feminism, social democracy and revolutionary socialism; and they also address real problems and false solutions as they pertain to postmodernism, nationalism, constitutionalism and immigration.