The “Intellectual Backbone to British Socialism”

eiews THE “INTELLECTUAL BACKBONE TO BRITISH SOCIALISM”1 R A. R History / McMaster U. Hamilton, , Canada   @. Royden J. Harrison. The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, –: the Formative Years. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, . Pp. xii, . .. n his significant and long-awaited first volume of the biography of the IWebbs, Royden Harrison concludes that their marital association was “the most fruitful partnership in the history of the British intellect” (p. ). This assessment is certainly persuasive by the standards of achievement Harrison has demonstrated as their legacies. His book is written with concise analysis, revelatory insights into their personalities, a finely tuned sense of irony and humour, as well as a lapidary prose style. It places in the shade all other scholarship on the Webbs up to , the cutoff year for this first volume. Unfortunately, Professor Harrison died in  before he could complete the second volume. Hence, the Passfield Trustees, who commissioned this biography, have had to find another historian to complete the work. A distinguished scholar of Victorian and twentieth-century Britain, Harrison has illuminated the Webbs’ accomplishments, and failures, by setting their lives within the context of British intellectual and political history generally. With his gifts as a political theorist as well as his prowess as a historian, we are given careful analyses of the persistent influence of Positivism in Britain, the impact, however brief, of Herbert Spencer and William Morris on British thought, the uneasy, ambivalent reception of Marxism in British intellectual life, and the roots and development of Fabian Socialism within the British Left with compelling reasons for its ultimate ascendancy over other forms of socialism in the United Kingdom. Along the way, readers are presented with fresh insights into a number of oft-studied dominant people in this time of the emergence and  The phrase is from Russell’s portrait of the Webbs (PfM, p. ). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter –): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  -  Reviews development of Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter as individuals and as a partnership . Notable among those upon whom Harrison casts fresh light are Joseph Chamberlain, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Haldane and, not least, Bertrand Russell. For his part, Russell gave Harrison “the most helpful of all interviews” (p. x) of the many who provided their personal recollections of the Webbs. Professor Harrison deposited the typescript of this interview in the Russell Archives at McMaster in  when he visited the Russell Editorial Project as an historical advisor. While Harrison probes Sidney without the direct assistance of anyone else, so that A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict, that he is “a door that can never be unlocked” (p. ), is shown to be manifestly incorrect, the author uses a critical insight from Russell to “unlock” the conflicted nature of Beatrice. Harrison’s “life and times” is particularly timely, for Fabianism, and the role and values of the Webbs especially, have come under severe attack over the past  years from historians of the “New Liberalism”, notably Peter Clarke and Michael Freeden in their path-breaking studies, respectively, Liberals and Social Democrats () and The New Liberalism (). For Clarke and Freeden and those of their persuasion and following, J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse, especially, were the important thinkers and advisors of the Liberal politicians who established the social reforms between  and . They presented their ideas through books, through articles in H. W. Massingham’s The Nation, and through occasional meetings with politicians, notably David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Moreover, the votaries of the New Liberalism transformed Gladstonian Liberalism by advocating collectivist reforms which increased personal liberty and were informed by democratic ideals. By contrast, Clarke and Freeden saw the Webbs’ Fabian claim that the “expert” was essential to guide the masses and their emphasis on permeating existing, often Conservative, elites, as undemocratic, sometimes authoritarian. Harrison concludes that a “certain distrust of the masses” was present, as with the earlier Utilitarians and even the Positivists (p. ). But as we shall see, the Webbs had a more complex and libertarian concept of democracy than these critics have given them credit for. The “litmus test” that Liberals of the time and their historians afterwards created for determining...

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