Equality and the British Left

A study in progressive political thought, 1900–64

Ben Jackson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719073076
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847796462
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The demand for equality has been at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth century, but what did theorists and politicians on the British Left mean when they said they were committed to 'equality'? How did they argue for a more egalitarian society? Which policies did they think could best advance their egalitarian ideals? Equality and the British Left provides the first comprehensive answers to these questions. It charts debates about equality from the progressive liberalism and socialism of the early twentieth century to the arrival of the New Left and revisionist social democracy in the 1950s. Along the way, it examines and reassesses the egalitarian political thought of many significant figures in the history of the British Left, including L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney and Anthony Crosland.

Newly available in paperback for the first time, this book demonstrates that the British Left has historically been distinguished from its ideological competitors on the Centre and the Right by a commitment to a demanding form of economic egalitarianism. It shows that this egalitarianism has come to be neglected or caricatured by politicians and scholars alike, and is more surprising and sophisticated than is often imagined.

Equality and the British Left offers a compelling new perspective on British political thought that will appeal to scholars and students of British history and political theory, and to anyone interested in contemporary debates about progressive politics.

Part I
1900–31: Foundations

1
Riches and poverty

1.1 Introduction: class conflict and political thought

The decades surrounding the First World War raised a testing question for the British political system: on what terms could the working class be integrated into a stable social settlement? Manual workers and their families constituted an overwhelming, but severely disadvantaged, majority of the British population in this period, and both their industrial strength and political power were on the increase. Over 70 per cent of the British workforce was drawn from the working class; trade unions had begun to tap into this potential support after a long period of quiescence, with the percentage of union members in the total labour force peaking at around 45 per cent in the early 1920s.¹ The gradual expansion of the franchise to include the male working class ensured that, for the first time, the workers were equal with other social classes in the civic realm. The minds of rational office-seeking politicians were now concentrated on how to craft a platform that could win working-class electoral support. The creation of autonomous Labour representatives in Parliament and the eventual emergence of a separate ‘Labour Party’ in 1918 pressed home the point.

Against this background of industrial instability, rapid political change and widespread concern about the ‘social problem’, politicians in the Liberal Party seized the initiative. The Liberal government of 1905–15, in alliance with the infant Labour Party, introduced fiscal and social policies that placed heavier financial burdens on the rich, while creating significant benefits targeted at relieving poverty. This ‘new liberalism’ aroused fierce opposition from the Conservatives and their upper-class supporters, who saw these policies as tantamount to the declaration of class war. The First World War exacerbated this social tension, since wartime Britain’s unprecedented collective social mobilisation generated starkly opposed perceptions of a fair distribution of sacrifice. Indeed, for a few brief years after 1917, socialist revolutions seemed to be sweeping across Europe. This offered the more alarmist members of the upper class an unappetising intimation of the most extreme resolution possible to class conflict in Britain. The post-war replacement of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party as the principal party of the Left apparently confirmed the arrival of an era of acrimonious distributive conflict and significant political controversy about state intervention in the economy.²

Although this class conflict clearly reflected important material grievances, it would be a mistake to suppose that these clashes of economic interest straightforwardly translated into political action without first being mediated through political discourse and, ultimately, relatively complex forms of political thought.³ On the contrary, British political debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was riven by conflicting theories about the nature of the social settlement that could best accommodate working-class aspirations and eliminate the distributive conflict that had engulfed British society. Important research has documented a variety of influential theoretical languages in this period, most of them organised around the question of whether poverty, unemployment and class stratification should be regarded as an individual or a social responsibility. Advocates of social reform argued that social (and hence state) responsibility should be extended to include distributive matters that had previously been regarded as the province of individual initiative and private benevolence. Drawing on contemporary intellectual currents, such as idealist philosophy or evolutionary theory, social reformers claimed that social structures, rather than character and will-power, wielded a decisive influence over the economic fate of individuals, and argued that state provision of material resources or employment opportunities would enhance rather than detract from the flourishing of the individual. This was clearly a theoretical innovation of the first importance, and it has rightly absorbed the attention of many scholars working in this field.⁴

Yet there is a related topic that has remained largely implicit within this scholarly discussion, and which this book aims to bring to the surface and to discuss in some detail. While the crucial first ideological step towards a state that provided for social welfare was the claim that citizens were vulnerable to many contingencies outside of the control of the individual, this still left undefined the precise distributive pattern that was thought to realise this new understanding of social responsibility. Of course, there was little question that this conceptual shift would in practice legitimate policies that redistributed economic resources from the rich to the poor, but the more important theoretical issue, at least as far as intellectuals on the Left were concerned, was to identify distributive principles that could guide such policies by describing an ideal division of wealth, opportunities and work. Only once such a theory had been elaborated would the larger ethical purpose of redistribution become clear.

The first three chapters of this book provide a detailed discussion of the distributive principles debated and endorsed by the Left in the period that begins roughly at the turn of the century and concludes with the fall of the second Labour government in 1931. In particular, they show that a dual commitment to an egalitarian view of social justice and a more co-operative community united the otherwise diverse gradations of progressive ideology. Left liberals and socialists replied to the meritocratic or libertarian ideals espoused by rival ideological camps with a political discourse that emphasised the moral arbitrariness of market outcomes; the extent to which economic success was a collective rather than an individual achievement; and the need to condition economic rewards on productive effort. Strongly egalitarian principles were then derived from these commitments and applied to the formulation of public policy.

In order to reconstruct this egalitarian ideology, these chapters call on a familiar cast-list and range of sources: the leading progressive publicists of the time and the numerous books, pamphlets, speeches, newspapers and periodicals in which left-wingers debated the issues of the day. Particular attention is paid to the ideological overlap and mutual influence between three groups that played a central role in the production of the Left’s political ideas. First, the prolific new liberal theorists Leonard Hobhouse and John Hobson (and their allies), who articulated the most radical version of British liberalism and also wielded some influence over the formulation of British socialism. Second, the leading socialist thinkers of the early twentieth century: Fabian intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, as well as the key theorists and politicians of the Independent Labour Party (ILP): Bruce Glasier, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden. Third, the younger generation of socialist academics and publicists who first rose to prominence immediately before the First World War, notably G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski and R. H. Tawney. Although the political thought of many of these figures has been well discussed elsewhere, only in the case of Tawney has there been a specific study of egalitarian themes,⁵ and there has as yet been no systematic attempt to investigate the overlaps between the ideals of social justice advocated by all three groups.⁶

This chapter begins my account of their shared egalitarian outlook by considering the Left’s objections to class inequality. Progressive writers and politicians employed a variety of arguments against inequality; by documenting the range of these arguments I will give an initial indication of the character of the Left’s egalitarian vision. I then ask whether progressives saw the aims of social mobility and meritocratic equal opportunity as able to satisfy their concerns about class inequality. I maintain that a meritocratic distribution was seen as an insufficient realisation of the Left’s understanding of social justice, and this lays the groundwork for the more substantively egalitarian position discussed in subsequent chapters.

1.2 Why inequality mattered

‘Justice is a name to which every knee will bow’, wrote Hobhouse in 1922. In contrast, ‘equality is a word which many fear and detest’.⁷ While the postulation of some dimension of substantive equality as a legitimate social goal generated an outraged response from one social constituency, it was also apparent to the Left that equality was able to draw on certain bases of social support that lent it considerable rhetorical power. It was widely believed that the central demand of the working class was for equal treatment across a variety of dimensions, and the ethic of mutual co-operation and solidarity that was thought to characterise working-class communities and political organisations served as a concrete instantiation of the egalitarian social norms that should be extended across the nation. This polarity in public opinion was frequently discussed during the upsurge in industrial unrest that both preceded and succeeded the First World War, and during the related disruption to social and economic relationships created by the War itself.⁸ ‘To the great mass of the earners’, argued a typical post-war New Statesman editorial, ‘the War has enormously precipitated the growth of the conviction that, as between man and man in modern society, justice means, fundamentally, equality’.⁹

Against this background, egalitarian objectives were highlighted as central to the political contest between Left and Right. ‘Socialism implies the inherent equality of all human beings’, argued Keir Hardie, declaring that the ‘inward meaning of the rise of the Labour Party’ was the extension of the old radical principle of political equality to the economic sphere.¹⁰ As Hobson noted, an egalitarian spirit could also be seen as the most important factor differentiating the old liberalism from the new. New liberals, he wrote, sought to give ‘positive significance to the “equality” which figured in the democratic triad of liberty, equality, fraternity’.¹¹ Both socialists and liberals took as a starting point the modern view of democratic equality discussed in the Introduction, asserting that, in spite of the obvious differences in capacity or character between individuals, all were ‘equally entitled as human beings to consideration and respect’ because they possessed an underlying common humanity that should trump inequalities of talent or wealth. Each individual shared a basic similarity; any differences were only ‘those of degree and lie as it were on the surface of that deep-seated identity which is common human nature’.¹²

Why did the Left argue that class-based inequality infringed this ideal of equality of respect? While on the face it the answer might seem obvious, it is nonetheless worth pursuing this question in more detail. Progressive publicists and politicians voiced diverse objections to inequality, and their criticisms drew on a number of prestigious political ideals and important sociological claims. In order to make sense of the egalitarian commitments that were central to progressive ideologies in this period, the full extent of the Left’s revulsion at the inequalities of British society must first be recalled.

Left-wing critics of British society in the early twentieth century usually began their indictments with a very striking observation: the co-existence of terrible and widespread poverty with the enorm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I 1900–31: Foundations
• Part II 1931–45: Economics
• Part III 1945–64: Revisions
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index