Abstract
One of the most intriguing, though largely forgotten, strands woven into the rich tapestry of socialist culture in late nineteenth-century Britain was the Labour Church movement. This curious mixture of nonconformist piety and leftist revivalism brought together socialist worshippers from different religious backgrounds, and attracted those of no faith at all. At its inaugural meeting, on October 4, 1891, a string band played, after which the movement’s founder, John Trevor, led the congregation in solemn prayer. There followed a reading of a poem by American writer James Russell Lowell, and a Unitarian Minister, Harold Rylett, read from Isaiah 15. The choir then rose and led a rousing rendition of “England Arise,” the popular socialist hymn penned by Edward Carpenter.
The fascinating confluence of influences and traditions that informed this event is not easy to grasp from within the ambit of contemporary political theory. Yet the inter-weaving of secular morality and religious sentiment, the unashamed dose of English patriotism, and the nod towards American romantic radicalism were all staple features of the rich cultural brew out of which socialist thinking was made in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. This inaugural event is reported in Mark Bevir’s new study. And it encapsulates features of the ideas and thinkers of this era to which he wants to draw our attention. Socialism, he insists, was made and continually re-made, out of the materials afforded by a distinct and inter-twined number of traditions of thought.
More than this, Bevir determinedly sets out to overturn some of the established ways in which the thinking of this period has been gauged and remembered. He proposes a decisive shift away from the assumptions embedded in an older historiographical tradition which framed the rise of socialist politics as the result of exogenous transformations such as industrialisation and the emergence of class consciousness. Instead, he proclaims the merits of analysing the shifting languages and emerging ideas that were forged from a host of available traditions, in response to what contemporaries regarded as the most pressing dilemmas of the day.
Those familiar with this author’s contribution to debates about meaning and interpretation in the history of ideas—as set out in his The Logic of the History of Ideas—or his many subsequent publications in the fields of democratic theory, governance and contemporary British politics, may be surprised at this most recent turn in his work. Socialism is now a rarely aired, and barely examined, identification in contemporary political theory, particularly in its North American incarnations. But this study actually represents a “re-turn” in more than one sense. It showcases an impressive collection of articles that were written and published during the first phase of his career. These have been lightly revised, some years on, and are now book-ended by a distilled version of the interpretative framework which he advocates.
While many of these individual pieces are replete with scholarly insight, Bevir’s broader attempt to integrate his later framework into these studies produces mixed results. His approach undoubtedly sustains some of the most distinctive arguments coursing throughout the book, notably his insistence that we should appreciate the diversity and mixture of strands flowing into, and shaping, the main streams of socialist discourse—Marxism, Fabianism and ethical socialism.
And his framework informs some thought-provoking, and occasionally surprising, conclusions about each of these strands. Thus, while the influence and role of Marxist thought within the embryonic socialist communities of this period have been rather obscured by subsequent commentary, he shows that a wide range of British leftists were influenced by Marx’s economic theories. Their simultaneous ignorance of his philosophical and political writings encouraged the tendency to draw upon other, home-grown ethical and political beliefs—Tory radicalism among them—in generating socialist thinking. Marxism was a ubiquitous presence, but not an undiluted influence, within the fledgling communities of British socialism.
Fabianism also comes to assume a rather different aspect in this study. In opposition to the abiding temptation to caricature this grouping as “bureaucratic elitists who were inspired by utilitarianism and classical political economy” (p. 130), he follows other scholars who have shown that leading figures in the Society were in dialogue with a welter of different ideas. In a fine essay on Sidney Webb, Bevir punctures the myth which still endures in some quarters that his was the thinking of a soulless utilitarian. Webb’s thinking in fact emerged from a uniquely late-Victorian merging of ethical ideas about social duty and new forms of positivist thought.
As for the ethical socialists, long regarded as the unsullied saints of the early socialist years, Bevir’s interpretations support a rather different reading. Many were grappling with new forms of Christian theology and older kinds of romanticism, and were less likely to be formed by the liberal radicalism which pervaded other parts of the socialist movement. Out of these sources there emerged new ideas of ethical fellowship and all sorts of experiments in personal regeneration and communal living, a number of which were pretty flaky in kind.
Insightful and scholarly as his individual essays are, there are some wrinkles too, which appear to be related to the interpretative apparatus that is introduced at the outset. Bevir’s abiding analytical commitment to establishing traditions as the primary contexts against which individuals shape and refine their own beliefs leads at times to the mechanical recitation of relevant paradigms, sometimes at the expense of a closer focus upon how and why an author drew from, or blended, particular traditions.
Equally, his repeated insistence upon the primacy of the two main “dilemmas”—the demise of classical economic theory and the crisis of faith—against which major traditions were revised, serves in the end to downgrade the construction of other “dilemmas”—about deteriorating social conditions, economic crisis, and popular morality, for instance—which were arguably as important to socialist thinkers in these years.
But perhaps the major weakness on show concerns his presentation of the historiographical traditions that have shaped thinking about this, often venerated, period in the history of the British left. The book’s opening chapter divides the multiple strands of scholarship which these years have attracted into “old” and “new” historiographies. The former is deemed almost irretrievably problematic, and its central focus upon class, production, trade unions, political organisation and the state became implausible, we are told, in the late twentieth century when its “unified and linear story” (p. 3) came unstuck. This sweeping and pretty dismissive tour d’horizon sets this discussion in an unhelpfully dualistic mould. It results in the lumping together of a rich and complex body of historical and political thought, including figures like Eric Hobsbawm, G. D. H. Cole, and Edward Thompson, who might well be regarded as the authors of forms of thinking—about agency, history, culture, and association—which are antithetical to those with which they are here associated.
The “new historiography,” by contrast, has taken shape since the 1970s around “a greater concern with the role of ideas in the construction of social and political practices” (p. 3). Even though it receives a general endorsement from Bevir, a number of its representatives are given short shrift for their reading of the linguistic turn or affinity for post-structuralism. There is too much of the perfunctory and the polemical about this framework. Why it is that we should attend so carefully to the traditions and complex intentions of nineteenth-century socialists, but not to those who wrote about them, remains something of a mystery.
These historiographical issues aside, Bevir begins and ends with some refreshingly direct normative and political reflections. Lamenting the recent success of its opponents in framing socialism as a doctrinaire ideology that supports bureaucratic and utilitarian forms of governance, he contends that if we come to see that socialism was closely associated with justice, radical democracy, and the establishment of new forms of life, then the prospects for rehabilitating these aspects of the left’s heritage will be considerably improved. His insistence upon the need for a reconstituted “grand narrative” in relation to socialism, contra the particularising predilections of much of the so-called new historiography, is both bold and welcome.
But these normative ambitions do not gel easily with the historicised character of his analysis, and the kind of path dependency implied by this version of the history of ideas. Given that our available traditions have been reconfigured considerably since this period, and that our dilemmas are a long way from those of our predecessors, on what basis can we share his confidence that a re-engagement with these earlier patterns of thinking will stimulate creative or useful reflections in the present, rather than lead us to repeat the mistakes or follow the blind-alleys of the past? Like several other political theorists who have also recently harked back to this period in order to challenge current orthodoxies on the political left—the so-called Blue Labour group in Britain, 1 Bevir sees the demise of some of the anti-statist and radical-democratic strands of early socialism as a casualty of the “hardening” of ideological dividing lines associated with the formation of the party system and the dualism of the Cold War. Yet we might well want to pause at this point and ponder whether there may be aspects of these bodies of theory that are likely to be inadequate to the tasks of framing progressive responses to the dilemmas of the current era, not least the political constraints and trade-offs associated with modern representative politics, the rise of neo-liberalism, the establishment of mass consumerism, and the decline of the welfare state.
Quibbles aside, Bevir’s book very successfully establishes the origins and historical character of some of the most important strands of later Anglophone democratic and egalitarian theory. It has much to offer those many historians and thinkers interested in the provenance of, and prospects for, progressive political thought. And it shows that in this sense, at the very least, socialism ought to be seen as a tradition that is far from extinct.