Social democracy is officially a reformist democratic socialist political ideology. Social democracy supports legal entitlements in social rights for citizens. These are made up of universal access to public services such as: education, health care, workers' compensation, and other services such as child care and care for the elderly. Social democracy is connected with the trade union labour movement and supports collective bargaining rights for workers. Contemporary social democracy advocates freedom from discrimination based on differences of: ability/disability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, language, race, religion, and sexual orientation. Most social democratic parties are affiliated with the Socialist International.

Social democracy in its current form was originally developed by revisionist Marxist Eduard Bernstein who criticized orthodox Marxism's emphasis on revolution and class conflict, claiming that socialism could be achieved through evolutionary means through representative democracy and through cooperation between people regardless of class. Bernstein claimed that a mixed economy of public, cooperative and private enterprise would be necessary for a long period of time before private enterprises would evolve of their own accord into cooperative enterprise. Bernstein supported state ownership only for certain parts of the economy that could be best managed by the state, he rejected a mass scale of state ownership as being too burdensome to be manageable.

Tony Robert Judt, FBA (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) (pronounced Jutt) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

A Marxist Zionist as a young man, Judt dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in Israel in the 1960s and came to see a Jewish state as an anachronism; he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat". Judt's works include the highly acclaimed Postwar, a history of Europe after the Second World War. He was also well known for his views on Israel, which generated significant debate after he advocated a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Takis Fotopoulos (Τάκης Φωτόπουλος) (born October 14, 1940) is a political philosopher and economist who founded the inclusive democracy movement. He is noted for his synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He was an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles, several of which have been translated into various languages. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature) and author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy in which the foundations of the inclusive democracy project were set. Fotopoulos is Greek and lives in London.

Fotopoulos was born in the Greek island of Chios and his family moved to Athens soon afterwards. After earning degrees in Economics and Political Science and in Law from the University of Athens, he moved to London in 1966 for postgraduate study at the London School of Economics on a Varvaressos scholarship from Athens University. He was a student syndicalist and activist in Athens and then a political activist in London, taking an active part in the 1968 student movement in London, as well as in organisations of the revolutionary Greek Left during the struggle against the military junta in Greece (1967–74). During this period, he was a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Groups in London, which published the newspaper Μαμή ("Midwife", from the Marxian dictum, "violence is the midwife of revolution"), for which he wrote several articles.

James Laxer (born December 22, 1941) is a Canadian political economist, professor and author.

In 1969, Laxer, along with his father Robert Laxer and Mel Watkins, founded the Waffle, a radical left wing group influenced by the New Left, the anti-Vietnam War movement and Canadian economic nationalism, that tried to win control of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

In 1971, Laxer ran for the leadership of the federal NDP, and shocked the convention by winning one-third of the vote against party stalwert David Lewis. The Waffle was ultimately forced out of the NDP and briefly became an independent political party under the name "Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada". Laxer and other Wafflers unsuccessfully ran for Parliament in 1974. This electoral failure led to the Waffle's dissolution, and Laxer concentrated on his work as an academic at York University and in broadcasting.

In 1981, he was hired as director of research for the federal NDP, but left in controversy in 1983 when he published a report critiquing the party's economic policies as being "out of date".