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The Early Fabians—Economists and Reformers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Paul W. Fox  and
H. Scott Gordon
Paul W. Fox
Affiliation:
Carleton College
H. Scott Gordon
Affiliation:
Carleton College
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Extract

The socialist movement in Great Britain has been characterized by a combination of dynamic reformism and liberal reasonableness which is all too frequently lacking in the histories of left-wing movements in other parts of the world. While this may be explained to some extent by the traditional character of English habits of thought and political institutions, one organization is, more than others, responsible for the preservation of the liberal philosophy in an age of great social change. The Fabian Society came upon the scene when the economic foundations of that change were already well established. The development of the new industrialism had shown inequities and injustices which called for radical measures of economic reform. Yet while this economic change had been taking place, political institutions had undergone a considerable measure of liberalization. The latter was a development highly valued by the economic revolutionaries, and the Fabian Society was, from the very first, an effort to combine the two desiderata—to change the economic structure of society while preserving the democratic political achievements so newly gained and so highly prized.

The important early Fabian writings which dealt with matters of abstract economic theory were motivated by the belief that the great unsolved questions of the day were the economic. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, from 1870 on, the economic world was stricken with controversy. The placid perfection of the Ricardian classicism had been shattered by the frontal attack of the marginalists and the usurpation of Marx.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , August 1951 , pp. 307 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1951

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Footnotes

*

This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at Montreal, June 7, 1951. The authors would like to express their very deep appreciation to Professors G. D. H. Cole of All Souls College, Oxford, and F. H. Underhill of the University of Toronto, who read the manuscript and offered valuable comment.

References

1 Quoted in Underhill, F. H., “Fabians and Fabianism,” Canadian Forum, XXV, 03, 1946, 278.Google Scholar

2 A History of British Socialism (London, 1940), II, 245.Google Scholar

3 Socialism in England (London, 1893), 21.Google Scholar

4 “The Progress of Socialism,” Contemporary Review, XLIII, 04, 1883, 562.Google Scholar

5 The History of the Fabian Society (2nd ed., London, 1925), 19–21.Google Scholar Professor G. D. H. Cole, in reading this paper, makes the following comment at this point: “George's influence was great, but there is some tendency to overestimate it. Attacks on the land monopoly had been going on continually from Spence and Ogilvie and Paine's Agrarian Justice to the Land and Labour League in the 60's and 70's and crofters' movement in Scotland. Bronterre O'Brien made much of it (National Reform League, 1848); J. S. Mill was active in the land reform movement in the 70's; Joseph Chamberlain made much of it in his radical days. George combined, rather than created, the attack.”

6 Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, 21.Google Scholar

7 Pearson, Hesketh, G.B.S., a Full Length Portrait (New York, 1942), 321.Google Scholar

8 See Fabian Tract no. 7, Capital and Land (London, 1896)Google Scholar, passim, probably the most succinct exposition of Fabian theory on this particular subject. See also Shaw, G. B., “Economic,” Fabian Essays in Socialism, ed. Shaw, G. B. (London, 1931, originally published 1889).Google Scholar

9 Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, Appendix II, 284.Google Scholar The Basis was included in many Fabian tracts also.

10 Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (London, 1915), 213.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 213–17. Pease has pointed out Barker's, error in The History of the Fabian Society, 244–50.Google Scholar

12 Fabian Tract no. 30, The Unearned Increment (London, 1891), 1.Google Scholar

13 Shaw, , “Economic,” Fabian Essays, 25.Google Scholar

14 The following are a few examples to substantiate these claims:

“The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in Land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of Rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites.” “The Basis of the Fabian Society,” in Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, Appendix II, 284 Google Scholar; italics added. For virtually the same quotation see also Fabian Tract no. 12, Practicable Land Nationalization (London, 1890), 1.Google Scholar

Fabian Tract no. 12 also contains a “Practical Program for Radicals and Socialists” in which the following appear (p. 2) as two separate proposals for financial reform:

“2. (b) The taxation of Ground Rents and Values. …

(g) The special taxation of the unearned increment, by Municipal Death Duties on real estate, or otherwise.”

“We must distinguish between the value added to land merely by the increase in population, and that due to artificial improvements. The latter, in a sense, is not ‘unearned’ increment, from the point of view of the community, because it is caused directly by the labor of those who have worked on the land. But even this may be really ‘unearned’ as regards the landlord, if he has himself contributed no labor in return.” Fabian Tract no. 30, 1.

“Besides the annual rental, the owners of London receive a continual stream of wealth in the ‘unearned increment’ of value constantly being added to their property.” Fabian Tract no. 8, Facts for Londoners (London, 1889), 9.Google Scholar See also Fabian Tract no. 10, Figures for Londoners (London, 1889), 1 Google Scholar, which gives money values for London's rental and unearned increment incomes.

Probably the clearest statements of the distinction between the two concepts appear in passages too long to be quoted here: Shaw, , “Economic,” Fabian Essays, 24–5Google Scholar; and Pease, in his comments upon Barker, , The History of the Fabian Society, 246, note 1.Google Scholar

15 See, for example, Capital (London: Dent, 1933), 185–7.Google Scholar

16 See, for example, note 33 below.

17 The authors of this paper have discovered no evidence that Marshall owed his theory of “quasi-rent” to the Fabians. It may well be that the Fabians derived it from Marshall, picking it up, as so many people picked up Marshall's ideas, through his students, long before Marshall himself put them into print.

Professor G. D. H. Cole disagrees. He comments at this point: “I think Marshall was undoubtedly affected by the Fabians, though he did not like being told so; but he also got part of his quasi-rent notion from Nassau Senior and part from continental discussions of ‘rentabilité.’”

Professor Cole's general remarks on the larger point are: “Surely the notion of ‘rent’ as applying to other things besides land goes back far beyond Marshall or the Fabians. Senior applied it to ability—‘rent of ability’ is his doctrine. It was used in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in England to cover returns on capital (for example, by North) and in the term ‘rentabilité,’ which of course links it to ‘rentes’ in the French since it has a long history. I agree that the Fabians brought it out very clearly and influenced Marshall's notion of ‘quasi-rent,’ but I do not think they started the idea of a rent element in the return on capital.”

18 Webb, , Socialism in England, 19.Google Scholar Webb also wrote in the same book: “The publication of J. S. Mill's ‘Political Economy,’ in 1848, conveniently marks the boundary between the old and the new economics. Every edition of Mill's book became more and more socialistic in tone, until his death revealed to the world in the ‘Autobiography’ (p. 231–2) his emphatic and explicit repudiation of mere political democracy in favour of complete Socialism.” (p. 83)

19 Shaw makes this point: “Webb read Mill and mastered Mill as he seemed to have read and mastered everybody else; but the only other prominent Socialist who can be claimed by Mill as a convert was, rather unexpectedly, William Morris, who said that when he read the passage in which Mill, after admitting that the worst evils of Communism are, compared to the evils of our Commercialism, as dust in the balance, nevertheless condemned Communism, he immediately became a Communist, as Mill had clearly given his verdict against the evidence.” Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, Appendix I, 274.Google Scholar The famous passage in Mill to which Shaw refers is quoted, ibid., 21–2.

It is interesting to note that following this statement on Mill's influence upon the Society, Shaw says, “Except in these instances we heard nothing of Mill in the Fabian Society,” ibid., 274. This is just a bit difficult to believe. Webb seems closer to the truth when he writes in a Fabian Tract: “We who call ourselves Socialists to-day in England, largely through Mill's teaching and example. …” Fabian Tract no. 15, English Progress towards Social Democracy (London, 1893), 11.Google Scholar

20 “It is Mill who supplies the economic doctine; it is Mill who serves, in the years between 1848 and 1880, as the bridge from laissez-faire to the idea of social readjustment by the State, and from political Radicalism to economic Socialism.” Barker, , Political Thought from Spencer to the Present Day, 215.Google Scholar

“Mill was thus a radical and a social reformer: the first distinguished liberal with ‘Fabian’ leanings.” Roll, Erich, A History of Economic Thought (London, 1940), 359.Google Scholar

21 See, for example, Mill's, Autobiography (World's Classics), 209.Google Scholar

22 See Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, 24–5, 64–5.Google Scholar

23 This point is set forth clearly in Shaw, , “Economic,” Fabian Essays, 20–7, and Fabian Tract no. 15, 15.Google Scholar

24 See Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1937), chap. III.Google Scholar Professor G. D. H. Cole comments: “I do not agree that the question of relative power in economic bargaining ceased to be considered. It was under constant discussion in England from the 1820's to the 1840's—i.e. before Marx, — Owen, Hodgskin, Thompson, Senex (J. B. Smith), Trade Union pamphlets, etc.”

25 Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice, Industrial Democracy (London, 1897), 217.Google Scholar

26 Fabian Tract no. 15, 4-5, 6, 12, 15, respectively.

27 The latter two terms are used particularly in Shaw, “Economic,” and “Transition,” Fabian Essays, passim. See also Fabian Tract no. 4, What Socialism is (London, 1886), 5 Google Scholar, where “surplus value” is used in the Marxian sense. The Introduction to Tract no. 4 is strangely reminiscent of Marx.

28 Clarke, William, “Industrial,” Fabian Essays, 78 Google Scholar, and Webb. “Historic,” ibid., 46.

29 Cf., for example, Shaw's arguments in Fabian Tract no. 45, The Impossibilities of Anarchism (London, 1893)Google Scholar, especially the following passage:

“… the fact that we are too good for complete Unsocialism by no means proves that we are good enough for Communism. The practical question remains, Could men trained under our present system be trusted to pay for their food scrupulously if they could take it for nothing with impunity? Clearly, if they did not so pay, Anarchist Communism would be bankrupt in two days. … I submit, then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain. I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as possible, much less honorable.” (p. 15)

30 Fabian Tract no. 70, Report on Fabian Policy and Resolutions (London, 1896), 7–8.Google Scholar There is another equally clear discussion of these points in Fabian Tract no. 51, Socialism: True and False (London, 1899), 17–18.Google Scholar See also Shaw, , “Transition,” Fabian Essays, 181.Google Scholar

31 “The no-compensation cry is indeed a piece of unpractical catastrophic insurrectionism. … The land … will therefore be honestly purchased. …” ibid., 180.

“We want the municipal authority … [to have] compulsory powers of acquiring land for their purposes upon payment of a reasonable consideration to the present holders. …” Fabian Tract no. 6, The True Radical Programme (London, 1887), 7–8.Google Scholar

32 See Fabian Tract no. 6, 7, and Fabian Tract no. 11, The Workers' Political Programme (London, 1891), 8.Google Scholar

33 “… we aim at enrolling every able-bodied person directly in the service of the community, for such duties and under such kind of organization, local or national, as may be suitable to his capacity and social function. In fact, so far are we from seeking to abolish the wage-system so understood, that we wish to bring under it all those who now escape from it—the employers, and those who live on rent or interest, and so make it universal.” Fabian Tract no. 51, 17-18. See also Fabian Tract no. 7, 12.

“But every worker should be guaranteed a minimum of civilized existence, and the more able should receive a higher remuneration as rent of ability.” Beer, explaining Fabian doctrine, A History of British Socialism, II, 283.Google Scholar The Fabians appear to have introduced this phrase “rent of ability,” to describe the idea associated with it. Shaw has said that the phrase was so unheard of that when the Fabians first used it in their lectures it “was received with laughter.” Fabian Tract no. 41, The Fabian Society: Its Early History (London, 1899), 15.Google Scholar But see above, p. 312, note 17.

34 Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, Appendix I, 276.Google Scholar

35 The Eighteen Nineties (Pelican Books), 195.Google Scholar

36 Political Thought from Spencer to the Present Day, 207.

37 They did quote Jevons in support of certain of their demands for state interference. See, for example, Fabian Tract no. 9, An Eight Hours Bill (London, 1890), 9.Google Scholar

38 A11 of this goes back to Bentham, of course. Professor Underhill has pointed out also: “Later Fabianism came to conceive of a ‘harmony of interests’ to be achieved by the artificial intervention of the statesman; and this is just a continuation of one side of Benthamism. I have an impression that the Fabians were as muddle-headed as the Benthamites (who worked both with the natural harmony and the artificial harmony of interests) and that this was the cause of their immediate effectiveness.”

39 See, for example, Fabian Tract no. 5, Facts for Socialists from the Political Economists and Statisticians (London, 1887), 12, 19.Google Scholar

40 Pease, , The History of the Fabian Society, Appendix I, 277–8.Google Scholar

41 Shaw wrote in Fabian Essays: “… no exercise in abstract economics, however closely deduced, is to be trusted unless it can be experimentally verified by tracing its expression in history.” “Economic,” 23.