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The Rediscovery of English Democratic Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Bernard Crick
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Extract

‘SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND’. YET IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY obvious that the last decade has seen a remarkable revival of a specifically English tradition of democratic socialist thought. Most political writing in England, of course, has a bad press. I use ‘political writing’ in an obvious but also a special sense. By ‘political writing’ I mean serious writing about politics which is neither academic nor purely polemical. Sometimes it may be by academics, but then not academics writing for academics in a manner only comprehensible to academics; rather those books or articles which are written for a general public who take a serious interest in politics, whether directly or indirectly involved — say ‘literate citizens’.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1988 , pp. 424 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988

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References

1 Crick, Bernard, ‘Intellectuals and the British Labour Party’, Revue Fraqcaise ie Civilisation Britannique, IV, 1, 1987, pp. 8–23.Google Scholar

2 Crick, Bernard, ‘An Englishman Considers His Passport’, Irish Review, No. 5, 1988.Google Scholar

3 I first construed 'extremist' in the BBC anthology Words, BBC, 1976, p. 34.

4 Press release of speech by Neil Kinnock on 'Righting the Wrongs of the New Right' at the Ardwick Fabian Society, 12 Sept. 1986, quoted by myself in 'Return to Old Values', Scotsman, 22 Sept. 1986.

5 Cowling, Maurice, (ed.), Conservative Essays, Cassell, 1978.Google Scholar

6 Scruton, Roger, The Meaning of Conservatism, Macmillan, 1980.Google Scholar

7 Cormack, Patrick, (ed.), Right Turn, Leo Cooper, 1978.Google Scholar

8 Joseph, K and Sumption, J., Equality, John Murray, 1979.Google Scholar

9 Crick, Bernard, in Defence of Politics, Weidenfeld, 1962, pp. 127–31, later editions in Penguin.Google Scholar

10 See, for instance, Benn, Tony, Arguments for Socialism, Cape, 1979 and Arguments for Democracy, Cape, 1981; Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong?, Spokesman Books, 1979; and James Curran (ed.), The Future of the Left, Polity Press, 1984, although the latter had some outbreaks of realism as well as reiterative romanticism.Google Scholar

11 Evan Luard, Socialism Without the State, Macmillan, 1979.

12 A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics, Methuen, 1984, was a devastating critique of Lenin's rejection of politics and its fatal legacy.

13 See Owen, David, Face the Future, Cape, 1981 Google Scholar; and Williams, Shirley, Politicsfor People, Allen Lane, 1981.Google Scholar

14 Hattersley, Roy,Choose Freedom: the Future for Democratic Socialism, Michael Joseph, 1987 Google Scholar; and Gould, Bryan, Socialism and Freedom, Macmillan, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Which he said were ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’! Owen, op. cit., p. 5: ‘the old radical cry still emphasizes an eternal truth: that none of the three can properly be fulfilled without being combined in some measure with the other two’.

16 But if one sees revolution as a transformation of values, then one can be a democrat and a revolutionary; one can believe that such a transformation is only possible by political reform, consent and time (lots of time, generational time-scales not Mr Benn's fantasies of the First Hundred Days of a new government — see my Socialist Values and Time, Fabian Society, 1984).

17 Such as Durbin's, Evan The Politics of Democratic Socialism, Allen & Unwin, 1940.Google Scholar

18 See his My Kind of Socialism, Observer reprint, January 1982 and the essay on Silone in Debts of Honour, David Poynter, 1980.

19 Wright, Antony, Socialisms, Oxford University Press, 1986 and as editor, British Socialism: Socialist Thought from the 1880s to the 1960s, Longman, 1983.Google Scholar

20 Kitching, Gavin, Rethinking Socialism, Methuen, 1983 Google Scholar; and Rustin, Mike, For a Pluralist. Socialism, Verso, 1985.Google Scholar

21 Kitching, ibid., p. 133.

22 Nove, Alec, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Allen&Unwin, 1983 Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Basic Books, 1983;Google Scholar Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press, 1972 Google Scholar; and Baker's, John Arguing for Equality, Verso, 1987 Google Scholar (though not available to Rustin) is perhaps the best philosophic case for egalitarianism.

23 ln Jacques, Martin and Mulhern, Fred, (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted?, Verso, 1981.Google Scholar

24 'Eric Hobsbawm Interviews Tony Benn', Marxism Today, October 1980, an account of what was in fact a debate (at Birkbeck College), and an important and destructive one too — Bennites were visibly depressed as the vague shallowness of their hero was politely exposed.

25 Their most influential publication so far has been Forbes, Brian, (ed.), Market Socialism: Whose Choice? Fabian Society, 1986.Google Scholar Raymond Plant's Equality, Markets and the State, Fabian Society, 1984, was written before the group of which he was a leading instigator got under way, but it helped to set its agenda.

26 Runciman, W. G, Relative Deprivation and Social justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth Century England, Allen&Unwin, 1962.Google Scholar

27 As John Baker argues in Arguing for Equality, op. cit.

28 See Hindess, Barry, Freedom, Equality, and the Market, Tavistock, 1987 Google Scholar and Hirst, Paul Q, Law, Socialism and Democracy, Allen&Unwin, 1986.Google Scholar

29 Durbin, Elizabeth, New Jerusalems: the Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism, Routledge, 1986, a scholarly and timely study of her father's circle in the 1930s.Google Scholar

30 Keane, John, Democracy and Civil Society, and, as editor, Civil Society and the State: European Perspectives, Verso, 1988.Google Scholar

31 Bryan Gould, Socialism and Freedom, op. cit.

32 Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom, op. cit.

33 I elaborated and related these sacred sisters in my Socialist Values and Time, op. cit.; in the appendix, 'A Footnote to Rally Fellow Socialists' to the 1982 Pelican edition of In Defence of Politics, and with David Blunkett in The Labour Party's Aims and Values: An Unofficial Statement, Spokesman Press, 1988.

34 Notably his Fabian Autumn Lecture of 12 November 1985, The Future of Socialism, Fabian Society 1986. He followed Raymond Plant, Julian Le Grand, Antony Wright and others in treating R. H. Tawney's Equality and The Acquisitive Society as classic statements of English democratic socialism. Geoffrey Foote in his The Labour Party's Political Thought. A History, Croom Helm, 2nd. ed. 1986 (itself part of the rediscovery) is kind to say (p. 341) that 'this concentration on socialist values' can be traced to my Socialist Values and Time, 1984. But it was in the air and some of us had always breathed it. Kinnock's Mackintosh Memorial Lecture of 24 June 1983 was all about values and full of quotes from both Tawney and Bevan (see an extract in The Scotsman, 25 June 1983 and a longer one in the New Statesman, 7 October 1983).

35 Kinnock published a rather slight book, Making Our Way: Investing in Britain's Future, Blackwell, 1986, which used none of his more thoughtful speeches on values but tried to show in the pre-election period how hard-headed he was economically; democratic socialism had always been about production! The Foreword to Social Justice and Economic Efficiency, Labour Party, 1988, the collective title for the seven policy reviews for the 1990s, claims that 'the review is firmly rooted in Labour's aims and values', but in fact they were all written before Democratic Socialist Aims and Values, which was a hastily drafted last-minute change of mind, a top-dressing not an irradiating core: the old machine pragmatists had won again.

36 Desai, M reviewing Aims and Values in Tribune, 18 03 1988, pp. 6–7; and Hobsbawm in Marxism Today, April 1988, pp. 14–17.,Google Scholar

37 Hobsbawm, op. cit., praised David Marquand's The Unprincipled Society, Cape, 1988 and said that his analysis showed ‘considerable potential’ for agreement on policy ‘within a broad anti-Thatcher coalition’. He'll get no thanks, but true intellectuals never do.