The Making of British Socialism

Mark Bevir

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691173726, 9780691150833
• eBook ISBN: 9781400840281
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A compelling look at the origins of British socialism

The Making of British Socialism provides a new interpretation of the emergence of British socialism in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that it was not a working-class movement demanding state action, but a creative campaign of political hope promoting social justice, personal transformation, and radical democracy. Mark Bevir shows that British socialists responded to the dilemmas of economics and faith against a background of diverse traditions, melding new economic theories opposed to capitalism with new theologies which argued that people were bound in divine fellowship.

Bevir utilizes an impressive range of sources to illuminate a number of historical questions: Why did the British Marxists follow a Tory aristocrat who dressed in a frock coat and top hat? Did the Fabians develop a new economic theory? What was the role of Christian theology and idealist philosophy in shaping socialist ideas? He explores debates about capitalism, revolution, the simple life, sexual relations, and utopian communities. He gives detailed accounts of the Marxists, Fabians, and ethical socialists, including famous authors such as William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. And he locates these socialists among a wide cast of colorful characters, including Karl Marx, Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde.

By showing how socialism combined established traditions and new ideas in order to respond to the changing world of the late nineteenth century, The Making of British Socialism turns aside long-held assumptions about the origins of a major movement.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Socialism and History

“WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS Now: The Perils and Promise of the New Era of Big Government” ran the provocative cover of Newsweek on 11 February 2009. A financial crisis had swept through the economy. Several small banks had failed. The state had intervened, pumping money into the economy, bailing out large banks and other failing financial institutions, and taking shares and part ownership in what had been private companies. The cover of Newsweek showed a red hand clasping a blue one, implying that both sides of the political spectrum now agreed on the importance of such state action.

Although socialism is making headlines again, there seems to be very little understanding of its nature and history. The identification of socialism with “big government” is, to say the least, misleading. It just is not the case that when big business staggers and the state steps in, you have socialism. Historically, socialists have often looked not to an enlarged state but to the withering away of the state and the rise of nongovernmental societies. Even when socialists have supported state intervention, they have generally focused more on promoting social justice than on simply bailing out failing financial institutions.

A false identification of socialism with big government is a staple of dated ideological battles. The phrase “We are all socialists now” is a quotation from a British Liberal politician of the late nineteenth century. Sir William Harcourt used it when a land reform was passed with general acceptance despite having been equally generally denounced a few years earlier as “socialist.” Moreover, Newsweek’s cover was not the first echo of Harcourt’s memorable phrase. On 31 December 1965, Time magazine had quoted Milton Friedman, a monetarist economist who later helped to inspire the neoliberalism of the 1980s and ’90s, as saying, “We are all Keynesians now.” During the twentieth century, conservative and neoliberal ideologues encouraged “red scares” by associating not just Soviet communism but also socialism, progressivism, and Keynesianism with totalitarianism. All kinds of benevolent and ennobling projects were thus decried. The Appalachian Trail was the first completed national scenic trail in the United States. It is managed by a volunteer-based organization and maintained by trail clubs and multiple partnerships. It houses and protects some two thousand rare and endangered species of plant and animal life. This trail was first proposed in 1921 by Benton MacKaye, a progressive and an early advocate of land preservation for ecological and recreational uses.¹ MacKaye’s inspiring vision was of a hiking trail linking self-owning communities based on cooperative crafts, farming, and forestry and providing inns and hostels for city dwellers. Critics complained that the scheme was Bolshevist.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the cold war helped entrench particular ways of thinking about socialism. Socialism became falsely associated with state ownership, bureaucratic planning, and the industrial working class. As a result, before the financial crisis, socialism appeared to some to be disappearing into the history books. There were numerous empty celebrations of the triumph of capitalism. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 became a popular marker for the end of “real socialism.” Few communist states remained, and they were communist in little more than the official title of the ruling political party. Socialism, progressivism, and Keynesianism seemed to be faring little better. In Britain the Labour Party rebranded itself as “New Labour.” The party’s leaders accepted much of the neoliberal critique of the Keynesian welfare state. They explicitly rejected old socialist “means,” including state ownership, bureaucratic planning, and class-based politics. Moreover, although they suggested that they remained true to socialist “ends,” this change in means entailed a shift in ends, with, for example, the greater role given to markets pushing the concept of equality away from equality of outcome and toward equality of opportunity.²

Perhaps an adequate response to current and future problems depends on a rejection of the caricatures of old ideological battles. Perhaps we would be better placed to consider possible responses to problems—such as those posed by the financial crisis and ecological preservation—if we had a more accurate understanding of the nature and history of socialism. Perhaps we should treat the pulling down of the Berlin Wall not as a sign of the triumph of capitalism but as the end of the conceptual dichotomy that had pitted socialism against capitalism.³ Perhaps we should see the collapse of real socialism not as justifying an empty neoliberal triumphalism in which global capitalism has swept all before it but as an opportunity to reconsider the history of socialism.

Today, as the cold war recedes into the past, we might do well to retrieve lost socialist voices, their histories, and their continuing legacy and relevance. In this book, I rethink socialism by looking back to the late nineteenth century, before ideological lines became hardened by political parties and cold-war warriors. I explore creative exchanges between socialism and other traditions, including popular radicalism, liberal radicalism, and romanticism. I show that socialism was closely associated with progressive justice, radical democracy, and a new life. In doing so, I hope to offer a fruitful history that will inspire further research. And I hope also to retrieve neglected socialist ideas that might inspire political action today. The era of state ownership, bureaucratic planning, and the industrial working class may perhaps be behind us. But even if it is, many socialist ideas remain viable and exciting—perhaps necessary, definitely worth fighting for.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

My account of the making of British socialism participates in a historiographical revolution. Just as the end of a simplistic dichotomy between socialism and capitalism makes it possible to retrieve alternative socialist pasts, so rejecting that dichotomy contributes to the rise of new ways of narrating those pasts. The old historiography suggested that socialism arose as the working class became conscious of itself as a class. Historians told the story of workers and their socialist allies reacting to the rise of capitalism by founding political parties, taking power, and building socialist and welfare states. Ideas generally appeared as mere reflections of socioeconomic developments. Today, however, political events, social movements, and theoretical arguments have all combined to dismantle the old historiography. Historians have adopted more fluid concepts of socialism and demonstrated a greater concern with the role of ideas in the construction of social and political practices. They point the way to a new historiography that shows how people actively made socialism by drawing on diverse traditions to respond to dilemmas and to inspire new practices. This chapter discusses this historiographical revolution as it relates to the making of British socialism.

The old historiography emerged in the late nineteenth century alongside the socialist movement, and it remained largely unchallenged until the 1980s. The old historiography attracted Marxists, laborists, and progressives, ranging from G.D.H. Cole to the Hammonds and on, most famously, to Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson.⁴ These historians told a unified and linear story about capitalism and its socialist critics. They argued that capitalism possessed an innate, largely natural trajectory defined by its inner laws. Initial opposition to capitalism took the form of a Luddite resistance, which was soon exposed as naive.⁵ Socialists and workers had to learn the nature of a capitalist society that had arisen independently of their beliefs and actions. As the workers caught up with the reality of capitalism, so they developed class consciousness.⁶ Working-class consciousness appeared and developed through Chartism, the trade unions, the socialist movement, the Labour Party, and the welfare state. This old historiography thus defined a clear research agenda around the topics of class, production, trade unions, the Labour Party, and the central state as an agent of socioeconomic transformation.

While the old historiography sometimes drew on a materialism and determinism associated with Marxism, it also fitted easily into general accounts of the Victorian age as a time of unprecedented growth. Most social historians believed that the Industrial Revolution brought a rapid entry into modernity during the early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution marked a clear break with traditional society. It introduced a world of factories, the bourgeoisie, political reform, an organized working class, and thus class conflict and class accommodation.⁷ Even after Thompson encouraged social historians to emphasize human agency in contrast to a crude Marxist determinism, they continued to study the ways in which people had made this modern world. Thompson himself studied “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete handloom weaver, the utopian artisan,” not only to rescue them “from the enormous condescension of posterity,” but also to show how they made a modern, organized, and politically conscious working class.⁸ Although Thompson emphasized the role of Protestantism, he presented working-class agency as a response to more or less pure experiences of socioeconomic reality. The turn to agency thus left the old historiography intact even as it broadened the research agenda to encompass more subjective aspects of the past.

Challenges to the old historiography reflected both the limitations and the successes of Thompson’s intervention. Historiography still privileged a teleological narrative of the rise of the working class, and it still centered on topics such as class, production, unions, socialist parties, and the central state. It thus seemed unable to extend itself to cover widespread changes in the social and political landscape, including deindustrialization, neoliberalism, identity politics, and the new social movements. The forward march of labor had come to an abrupt halt.⁹ Of course, Marxist historians had long grappled with the failure of the working class to fulfill its revolutionary role; they tried to explain this failure by appealing to theories about the peculiar nature of British society, social control, and hegemony.¹⁰ By the 1980s, however, the changing social and political landscape posed a more general dilemma for social historians. The dilemma was that the theoretical bases of the old historiography—with its focus on class, production, trade unions, political organization, and the state—appeared more and more implausible as the dominant story of modernity. The theory lurking behind much social history had failed. Some social historians responded to this dilemma by rejecting theory. Thompson conflated his turn to agency with a rhetorical dismissal of theory in favor of an empirical focus on people’s experiences of the past.¹¹ Other historians turned to new theories, including many that treated language and ideas as relatively autonomous from the development of capitalism.

Parallel challenges to the old historiography arose out of the very successes of Thompson’s intervention. Thompson’s success in conferring voice and agency on hidden figures of the past inspired numerous historians. Thompson himself echoed an idealized view of a robust, masculine working class engaged in public bodies and didactic self-improvement. Yet, many of the historians he inspired began to retrieve other voices. For a start, even when historians stuck with the male working class, they often shifted their attention from production to consumption. Historians explored the voices of workers interested in the music hall, football, and private leisure activities.¹² In addition, this interest in sites of consumption recast the study of cultural and political identities.¹³ Historians explored consumption in part because they had become interested in voices other than those of the male working class. New social movements helped shift attention from the factory floor to the family household, the department store, and the imperial museum. Historians explored the voices of women, gays, and colonial subalterns. In doing so, moreover, they pointed to frequent contrasts and tensions between these people and male workers. Joan Scott explicitly argued that the Victorian working class was a masculine construction defined in contrast to a middle class that was accordingly given a feminine identity.¹⁴ A new generation of imperial historians highlighted the racist elements in movements for social and political reform.¹⁵ A greater awareness of consumption, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity undermined the old historical narrative of the working class spearheading demands for the people’s rights and interests along the path to industrial modernity and socialist government. It increased the appeal of new theories that gave a greater autonomy and role to discourses and beliefs.

The transformation of social history continued throughout the 1990s, and it had important consequences for the study of socialism. The greater attention paid to language and ideas spread to the history of socialist thought. The rise of new topics such as gender encouraged a more fluid concept of socialism. Today, therefore, socialism often appears less as the natural outcome of workers’ reacting to the prior formation of capitalism and more as a contingent and variegated cluster of political theories.

Historians of socialism now pay more attention to language and ideas. They are less ready to accept that socioeconomic changes necessarily lead to class consciousness, recognition of the social causes of social evils, and so laborism and socialism. Instead, they look more closely at language and the written evidence of radical movements in order to recover people’s beliefs. One of the earliest and most prominent examples was Gareth Stedman Jones’s study of Chartism.¹⁶ The old historiography portrayed Chartism as the first expression of the class consciousness of the workers; the Chartists broke with popular Luddite forms of resistance and initiated a modern social outlook. In contrast, Stedman Jones treated the language of protest as relatively autonomous from the development of capitalism. He suggested that the language of the Chartists pointed to a political movement as much as a social one. Chartism was less the inauguration of a modern working class looking forward to the twentieth century than the end of a popular radicalism reaching back to the eighteenth century.

When other social historians have examined language and ideas, they too have stressed continuity and populism. Intellectual historians of the eighteenth century have explored the diverse, complex languages within which social theorists and economists responded to the rise of capitalism, commercialism, and market society.¹⁷ Historians of radicalism and socialism have then traced the continuing legacy of these languages in the nineteenth century. Soo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One Introduction: Socialism and History
• Chapter Two The Victorian Context
• Part One: The Marxists
• Part Two: The Fabians
• Part Three: The Ethical Socialists
• Bibliography
• Index