INTRODUCTION
The book which is now published under the title '' A History of British Socialism, Volume I.,*' was intended by the author to be the first of two volumes, the second of which would carry the story of British Socialism into the opening decade of the present century. The War intervened before the second volume was ready for the Press, and Mr. Beer, like most other students, was compelled for the time being to lay his literary work on one side.
The first volume, therefore, is now published separately, the next, it is hoped, will appear on the return of peace. Together they will form the most complete account of the development of Socialist thought m Great Britain which has yet appeared. The subject of the present volume is the growth of Socialism down to the rise of Chartism, and its readers must remember that there is a sequel in which the story is completed.
But the period with which it deals is sufficiently distinct to be studied separately, and the book is a unity, not a mutilated fragment. Mr. Beer's book is a study of political thought upon the group of problems created by the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, as it developed in the country which was the first to experience the transition, and which experienced it most completely.
It is called, A History of British Socialism," because the particular aspect of that thought with which it IS primarily concerned is the effort, partly gritical, partly constructive, at once aspiration, theory, prophecy, and programme, which had as its object to substitute for the direction of industry by the motive of personal profit and the method of unrestricted ^competition some principle of organization more compatible with social solidarity and economic freedom.
Like other summary designations of complex political forces, Socialism is a word the connotation of which varies, not only from generation to generation, but from decade to decade ; and Mr. Beer has wisely refrained from trimming the edges of an experimental and combative history to fit the framework of any neat definition. Instead of formulating a canon of Socialist orthodoxy and grouping the exponents of the faith according to the different degrees of their proximity to it, he has allowed the significance of his title to emerge from the different and sometimes contradictory currents of thought which inte mingle, in their natural complexity and exuberance and crudity, in the pages of his book.
His work is not the chronicle of a sect or of a party, but the analysis of a moral and intellectual movement. As the present volume shows, that movement can claim some classics. But it has developed less through the literary succession of a chain of writers than by the renewed and spontaneous reflection of each generation upon the dominant facts and theories which confronted it. The mental atmosphere of England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the reactions of the French Revolution and the long War, the agitation which preceded, and the disillusionment which followed, the first Reform Bill, the influence of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the Utilitarians form a background without a description of which English Socialism, in its seminal period, is unintelligible.
Mr. Beer has set them m the high light which they deserve. He presents the main elements in the political thought of the time, not as specimens in a museum, but in the tumultuous energy and profusion with which they swept across the mind of a tormented generation. The key to the heart of an economic age lies in economics, as to that of a religious age it is religion. What he offers is a study of one side of the great debate upon the merits of modern industrial civilization, which the nineteenth century, at the climax of its triumphant self-confidence, could ignore but could not silence, and which is still unended. His feet are always planted on solid earth, and he is not of those who would convert history into a procession of abstractions.
But the theme of his book is political thought, not political events, and he is more interested in the workshops where doctrines are forged and sharpened than in their use in the field, if there are critics who regard the history of opinion as an unprofitable dilettantism, they may be invited to reconsider their judgment when they have read the second part of the present volume. For the ideas whose development and genesis it traces are not antiquarian cunosities, but a high explosive,—and an explosive which has not yet been fired.
These ideas have a long history, and the first ninety-one pages of the present volume are given to a description of the communist elements in English thought from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Like the Christianity of Plato, the Socialism of the ammae naturahter soctahshcae of the pre-industrial era bears its name by metaphor or analogy, and the treatment which it receives from Mr. Beer must not be interpreted as implying that he regards a spiritual affinity as a direct affiliation. The importance for him of the earlier thinkers consists in the legacy of political principles which they transmitted.
Capitalist industry arose, as he points out, in a country which was intellectually prepared to receive it. It developed, not by a fortuitous series of technical discoveries, but through the concentration of thought upon definite problems to the exclusion of others, and there is a sense in which Locke and Blackstone were as truly its pioneers as Arkwright and Crompton. The first part of the book, therefore, is in the nature of an introduction to its main theme,—the development of political thought under the stress of Industrial Revolution.
The social history of the years from 1760 to 1840 has received more attention in England than that of any other period Toynbee, Held, Cunningham, and Mantoux have made its mam features familiar, and the brilliant books of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have painted an unforgettable picture of the meaning of the new economic regime to the workers in village and town. The political philosophy which triumphed has been the subject of an elaborate study by Leslie Stephen. Prof. Wallas has desenbed it, while it still had to fight for its existence. Prof. Dicey has shown how in the day of its power it transformed English thought and institutions between 1832 and 1870. What has never been adequately written is the history of the political philosophy which failed.
For the victory of the panegyrists of the new industrial order was so complete as to obliterate the very remembrance of its critics, and to create the impression that Utilitarian- ism spoke with the voice of reason itself. That is what seemed to be the case to the contemporaries who applauded. That is how it still often appears to-day. There was a leaden obscurantism which would not think. There was a blind movement of misery among masses hardly capable of thought. But in the first forty years of the century which saw the establishment of capitalist industry intelligence was united in its approval, and an alternative philosophy did not find expression in England till it was imported in the forties from abroad. That impression is natural, but the present volume shows that it is an illusion.
In the clash of political idea^ in the early nineteenth century there were not two protagonists, but three, and the least known had not the least vitality For capitalism was no sooner dominant than it produced its critics, and side by side with the economic theory of Ricardo and the political theory of Bentham there appeared a body of doctrine which attacked the fundamental basis of the new order.
It is not the case, therefore, as has sometimes been suggested, that the classical land of capitalist industry had to wait for an exposition of Socialism till a German exile disinterred dusty blue books in the British Museum. As Marx himself was well aware, there was an indigenous English Socialism which, except for the inspiration to all creative thought given by France, owed nothing to foreign influences.
Spence, Ogilvie, and Paine, oi whom an admirable account is contained in the late Mr. P. A. Brown's The French Revolution in English History, were agrarian reformers, though Paine was much more as well Godwin was an anarchist; Charles Hail was a conservative critic of capitalism rather than a socialist. But the writings of Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, all published, except that of Bray, which appeared in 1839, decade 1820-1830, laid down the main lines of Socialist thought more than twenty years before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto. Their works are almost unobtainable. Except in Prof. Foxwell's introduction to Anton Monger's book. The Right to the whole Produce of Labour, no adequate exposition of their writings has appeared in English.
And, as readers of the present work will discover, they were not isolated eccentrics, but representatives of a current of thought which offered the working classes what in the twenties and thirties they needed most,—a philosophy interpreting the causes of their degradation, and a body of articulate doctrine which could fuse into energy their misery, their passion, and their hope. It is this current of thought, its antecedents, affinities, and ramifications, its theoretical developments and practical effects in the world of industry and politics, which occupies the greater part of the present volume. Its immediate influence was pro- found.
The word '' Socialism " appears first to be used in the Co-operative Magazine of November, 1827, in which those who think that Capital should be owned, not individually, but in common, are described as Communists or Socialists/' Its meaning was not collectivism, but co-operation ; and co-operation not in the specialised sense which it has since assumed of a particular method of conducting trade, but with the larger significance of a social order based on fraternity, not competition. In that sense it was still used by the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844, when they proposed to ''arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government, or, in other words, to establish a self-supporting home colony of united interests."
Co-operation was a body of social principles before it was an economic device, and, if its practical application owed most to Robert Owen, the intellectual elaboration of the faith was the work of the early English Socialists. Their relation to Chartism and Trade Unionism was equally important To the former they helped to give the anti-capitalist bias, which, as the excellent work of the late Mr. Hovell shows was the practical motive to rally the turbulent workers of the North to the decorous political programme enunciated by Lovett and the London Workingmen's Association. Influenced partly by their teaching, which was disseminated in a popular form through the papers read by the working classes, trade unionism assumed a revolutionary and aggressive character as remote from the aims of the sober defensive associations of the sixties and seventies as from those of the local journeyman’s clubs of the eighteenth century.
That property not earned by labour is theft, that there is necessarily a class- war between the producers and the non-producers, that economic power precedes political power and that salvation must come, not from Parliament, but from syndicalist movements on the part of the organised workers—these were the watch words of the advanced trade unionism of the thirties ‘ ' With us, universal suffrage will begin in our lodges, extend to the general union, and finally swallow up the political power ” ; “ Social liberty must precede political liberty While we are in a state of social slavery, our rights would be exercised to the benefit of our tyrants, and we should be made subservient to the parties who work us for their purposes.” ^ Under the stimulus of such ideas, trade unionism became an effort directed to overthrowing the existing economic system, rather than to improving the condition of the wage-earner within it.
Trade union history, which like trade union law, has suffered from the tyranny of over-rigid definitions, requires to be rewritten in the light of them. When that is done, movements which now appear novel or ephemeral will possibly be found to be the re-emergence of tendencies which are fundamental and permanent. " The English intellect,” writes Mr Beer, in his preface, " from its sheer recklessness is essentially revolutionary. ... In periods of general upheaval, when the dynamic forces of society are vehemently asserting themselves, the English are apt to throw their mental ballast overboard and take the lead in revolutionary thought and action. In such a period are we living now.” His words are more appropriate to The present moment than to that at which they were written. "
Social Reconstruction ” is not the invention of the twentieth century ; and those who are concerned with it to-day may find in the intellectual ferment of the peiiod explored by Mr. Beer a medicine to chasten their hopes and to fortify their resolution. A foreign scholar has certain advantages in writing the history of modern England. He is not scorched by the embers of living controversies He is free from the prejudices of sect or paity, and can view his subject through plain glass. The snares of ready-made interpretations are not about his feet, nor conventional judgments upon his lips His eye for the sharp outline of facts has not been dimmed by a haze of familiar words. He can find a new significance in the obvious and still be surprised at what is surprising.
But only scholarship of a high order can give him the learning needed to compose a work like the present volume, and only long familiarity can save him from misinterpreting the atmosphere of a foreign nation. Mr. Beer possesses both. He is an indefatigable student, who knows the social history of England from the middle of the eighteenth century, as it is known only to Professor Graham Wallas, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. And his twenty years of residence in England have given him the working acquaintance with the unstated assumptions of English political life which is hardly less necessary than historical knowledge for the task which he has undertaken.
The present book is only part of the work which he had planned. In addition to the second volume, which was almost completed, he had begun, in conjunction with a friend, the task of reprinting the more noteworthy writings of the early English Socialists, and some of them were already in proof when he was interrupted. I see now," he wrote, in the last week of July, 1914, that I must use every moment for work. The War will upset all plans, if Germany gets involved in the Austrian madness I feel more than ever that no agitation and no class- war are of any use. Man is still brutal, and despite all religion, culture, and science, not far removed from the wild animal."
At a time when to speak of the unity of Europe seems a cruel jest, a work hke that of Mr. Beer, the history by an Austrian scholar of the English contribution to an international movement, is not only a valuable addition to historical knowledge, but a reminder that there are intellectual bonds which preceded the War and which will survive it English readers will thank him both for the one and for the other, and will hope that, by the publication of his second volume, he will in the near future increase the obligation under which he has already iaid them.
R. H TAWNEY
