[2] The book defined Labour's perspective on the post-war consensus, by which the major parties largely agreed on issues of the welfare state and economic policy from 1945 to the late 1970s.

[3] Crosland, an Oxford University academic before entering Parliament, had lost his seat in the 1955 general election, and so was able to finish the book he had been working on for several years, seeking to offer a new argument for social democracy in the context of the new political and economic consensus introduced by the 1945–1951 Clement Attlee governments.

Crosland demonstrates the variety of socialist thought over time, and argues that a definition of socialism founded on nationalisation and public ownership is mistaken, since these are simply one possible means to an end.

", Crosland argued that post-war capitalism had fundamentally changed, meaning that the Marxist claim that it was not possible to pursue equality in a capitalist economy was no longer true.

Following R. H. Tawney, Crosland stressed that equality would not mean uniformity: We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better-designed new street lamps and telephone kiosks and so on ad infinitum.Labour revisionism turned out to be a powerful ideological tendency within the Party in the 1950s and 1960s, taking intellectual sustenance from the Crosland book, and political leadership from Hugh Gaitskell.

Themes of class struggle were downplayed in favor of policies of high taxation, more widespread educational opportunity, and expanded social services.

We stand in Britain on the threshold of mass abundance.Crosland himself acknowledged in The Conservative Enemy (1962) the validity of the criticism of this view, and in this and his later writings and speeches he addressed the question of growth more centrally.

Recent Labour Education Secretaries, including Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson, have also drawn on Crosland's thinking in speeches and articles.

To mark its 50th anniversary, the book was republished by Constable & Robinson in association with the Fabian Society in the autumn of 2006, with a foreword from Brown, an introduction from Leonard and an afterword from Susan Crosland.