This work traces the trajectory of socialism from its early idealism, through the horror of Stalinism to its demise in a fin de siecle drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes. The author describes idealists and activists such as the French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, who was first to try to outlaw private property; Robert Owen, who hoped to plant a model socialist utopia in the United States; Clement Atlee, who set out to build socialism democratically in Britain; to Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping and Tony Blair, who became socialism's inadvertent undertakers.