The Webbs were Fabians. Violent revolution in the sense of Marx and Lenin, anarchic nihilism in the spirit of Kropotkin and Bakunin, were not options that a parliamentary democracy could contemplate. Irreversible evolution and reasoned persuasion would themselves be sufficient to assure the collectivisation of the means of production and the universalisation of the national minimum that would mark the end of an illegitimate and divisive social order.

The last word will not let struggling humankind down. Fabians and economists, socialists and historians, all unbiased empiricists will be in complete agreement on the face of the future: ‘Though progress may be slow, failure is impossible. No nation having once nationalized or municipalized any industry has ever retraced its steps or reversed its action. No failure of any experiment in such “collectivization” is anywhere recorded’ (SE 7). Change is not kaleidoscopic unknowledge but rather the progressive righting of the wrongs. The evidence points unambiguously to the ‘supersession of the Individual by the Community’ (SE 9). The future is red.

1 The Fabian Society

Dr Thomas Davidson, born in Aberdeen, living in New York, founded the Fellowship of the New Life in London in September 1883. Protestant, tending towards the secular, it was modelled on the Catholic Institute of the Brethren of Charity about which Davidson had written in his The Philosophical System of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1882).

Davidson was a classicist and an educator. He used the platform of his Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals (1882) and The Moral Aspects of the Economic Question (1888) to argue that the one-off monad is a fish out of water in the absence of a surrounding sea. Impressed by the high moral tone of the Papal Encyclicals that were to culminate in Rerum Novarum in 1891, he had visited Rome to discuss with the Pope the future of a non-acquisitive economics that would conform to the ethical code.

Davidson’s blend of spirituality, spiritualism and community appealed to detribalised younger professionals in search of a social purpose that would transcend the competitive capitalism of late-Victorian England. The consciousness of sin was in the air. Davidson had traced the origins of the ethical shortfall to private property that had left it to the Devil to provide for the hindmost.

Henry George in Progress and Poverty had in 1879 identified the rent of land as the Devil’s due. Functionless and conflictual, the unearned increment was a monopoly reward creamed off by the idle few to the detriment of the deserving many. The demand-determined surplus ought, George said, to be socialised by a single tax and reprioritised by the state.

The landlord neither creates the asset nor depletes it. Henry George, inspired by Ricardo’s Principles of 1821 on differential rent, saw no justification for a Smith-like ‘deduction’ that was no more than a passive surplus. Francis A. Walker, President of the American Economic Association, in 1887 extended the concept of surplus into the ‘rent of ability’. A quid without a quo, it was the functionless factor-income of those who are gifted with non-replicable talent. Even a worker might be blessed with an economic tradeable in fixed supply.

Marshall, Cairnes and Wicksteed continued the quest for quasi-rent that could make the spot ‘market period’ (Marshall 1890 [1949]: 290) last a lifetime. George’s monopoly can take many forms. The innate, like the situational, was an open door. Just as Ricardian socialists like Hodgskin and Bray had derived their worker-cooperatives from Ricardo’s labour theory, so Fabians like Sidney Webb in 1888 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics had traced their animosity to non-functional reward via Henry George to Ricardo on the theory of rent: ‘The whole product is divided between rent and wages’ (SW 1888: 472). Even plant once fixed must take what it can get. Fresh fish or the railway grid, business cannot rerun the past.

Henry George visited Britain from America in 1881. Some of the young professionals who were attracted to Dr Davidson were also won over by his call to arms. Poverty and wealth were two sides of the same coin. The state was obliged by its unique position to correct the imbalance. The economic market, they feared, would only exacerbate the injustice and the social distance.

Edward Pease and Frank Podmore were early adherents to the Fellowship, as were William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Havelock Ellis and Ramsay MacDonald. The utilitarians wanted self-determination and the franchise. The Owenites wanted self-help and cooperatives. Pease and Podmore opted instead for Davidson and the Vita Nuova while waiting overnight for a ghost to materialise in London NW. Some members of the Fellowship resided together at 49 Doughty Street. They hoped that their practice of non-competitive sharing and communal ownership would spread.

On 4 January 1884, in order to accelerate the material alongside the spiritual transformation, Pease, a Quaker, and 20 committed activists formed the Fabian Society. It is the oldest continuing socialist society in the world. In the watershed election of 1945 that fed through into the welfare state, 200 of the 394 Labour members in Parliament were Fabians.

Pease was made the first General Secretary in 1886. He served until 1939. At first unpaid, cross-subsidising his socialism with his day job as a stockbroker and an inheritance from his Fry chocolate relatives, he was later promoted to a pound a week. Webb and Shaw joined in its first year. Webb contributing the statistics and Shaw the histrionics, they were, Margaret Cole says, ‘one of the most devastating combinations ever known’ (Cole 1961: 54). While W.L. Phillips, a housepainter, was the exception, the first Fabians were almost all well educated and middle class. Membership into the Society was restricted, and by application only. There was little contact with the trade unions. Labour is conspicuous by its absence from the Fabian Essays.

The Fabians were united in their hostility to market homeostasis and the pursuit of profit. An unnatural economic system had released the demons of ‘adulteration, dishonest dealing and inhumanity’ (Pease 1916: 42). The first Fabian Lecture (on ‘Social Reconstruction and Development’ by J.G. Stapleton) and the first Fabian Tract (on Why Are The Many Poor? by Phillips) marked their entry into public affairs. Phillips’ Tract had a print-run of over 100,000 copies.

The Fabian Tracts were circulated within the Executive for comment. Beatrice, when she joined the Society in 1893, was struck by the extent to which the early Fabians, like the early Christians, were prepared to share and adapt: ‘The little group of leaders are practical communists in all the fruits of their labours’ (OP 36). Coming from the Society, the initial Tracts were not signed. In 1916 Pease published a list of the authors’ names (Pease 1916: 273–283).

The early Fabians knew that John Stuart Mill had covered the syllabus. Sidney Webb owned up to the debt: ‘The economic influence most potent among the Socialist Radicals is still that of John Stuart Mill’ (SE 85). Mill was an individualist who recognised that goods had done well out of economics but that ethics had lagged behind: ‘Mankind are capable of a far greater amount of public spirit than the present age is accustomed to suppose possible’ (Mill 1848 [1964]: III 976). Looking to the future, Mill had asked himself the big question. It had been ‘how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour’ (Mill 1873: 232). The Fabians, calling themselves socialists and not just reformers, set themselves the task of investigating whether Mill’s mixed cocktail of ‘individual liberty’ together with ‘common ownership’ together with ‘equal participation’ could indeed be operationalised into a viable programme.

The answer was not to be found in Marx. Pease had read Capital I (in French) in 1883. While he may have been mistaken (Shaw is known to have sampled it in the British Museum even before Aveling’s translation into English in 1887), Pease believed that he was on his own: ‘I do not think that any of the original Fabians had read the book or had assimilated its ideas at the time the Society was formed’ (Pease 1916: 24–5). Later in the decade some Fabians (including Sidney Webb) set up the short-lived Karl Marx Club, also called the Hampstead Historic Society. Among its members were the neoclassical economists Wicksteed and Edgeworth. Confirming the popular image of the Fabian Society as a ‘drawing-room discussion club’ (McBriar 1962: 17), it chose to fight with cups of tea in the Hampstead Public Library.

The early Fabians could not find much that they could use in Marx’s Capital. They are unlikely to have read Marx’s analytical essays on class and class-consciousness in France and Germany. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 which reveal Marx’s humanistic commitment to personal fulfilment were not accessible before 1932. That left Capital I. The early Fabians, Beatrice recalled in 1940, picked it up only to put it down: ‘I thought it was due to the fact that Fabians had never read Karl Marx, that if they had read him they would never have understood him and if they had understood him they would not have agreed with him’ (SBWL III: 445).

Eduard Bernstein was a German Marxist living in London who believed that the Fabians and the Marxists shared core common ground. He translated the Webbs’ Industrial Democracy into German in order to persuade Kautsky’s Social Democrats that the political kingdom need not mean the abandonment of the classics. In Evolutionary Socialism in 1899 Bernstein argued that Marx on economics remained as relevant as ever but that Marx on politics had to be brought up to date. Marx himself had been the first revisionist when, only five years after Capital I, he had conceded that the workers ‘may attain their goal by peaceful means’ (Marx 1872 [1974]: 324). Bernstein later, Marx before, had acknowledged the possibility of a democratic—a Fabian—transition. The Hampstead Historic Club will have sensed that Capital I contained the economics, but not the politics, of peaceable transformation. Capital I was not the last word on the state and the flow.

The Fabians were statists. Engels had asserted that the protective state would wither away once the capital-labour nexus had been socialised but that the managerial state would thereupon come into its own: ‘The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things’ (Engels 1878 [1987]: 268). Nothing could have been more Fabian or to have provided a better justification for an LSE. Marx and Engels were not anarchists. Most early Fabians nonetheless failed to see the extent to which the statism was always there. Soviet Communism did not make the same mistake.

The founding Fabians looked to the experts to provide the vision and the coordination that would keep the ship on course: ‘What the world needs is not less government but more …. We enjoy actually greater freedom on the highways because there is a Rule of the Road’ (SW 1923: 14). Spontaneity is for libertarians. Fabians rely on politics to deliver the greater good: ‘The Socialists are the Benthamites of this generation’ (SW 1894: 6). The similarity extends only loosely to subjective happiness, individual autonomy or consumer sovereignty. In respect of social engineering, however, Beatrice is right about the Fabians in general, Sidney Webb in particular: ‘Bentham was certainly Sidney’s intellectual god-father’ (OP 210).

Inspired by Davidson and George, influenced by Mill and Marx, the early Fabians knew that they had to mark out their territory. In 1885 in his Fabian Tract No. 3 on The Provident Landlords and Capitalists, Shaw put a face to the name. The Fabian Society exists, Shaw declared, expressly to promote ‘the establishment of Socialism in England’ (Shaw 1885: 1). In 1893, with Hyndman and Morris, he drew up a Manifesto of English Socialists. It linked the Society with the Federation and the League in the pursuit of economics beyond poverty and profit.

That was Shaw. The Society had to speak for itself. It did so in its constitution of 1887, delayed for three years until the words could be found that would embrace all strands of socialism. A new commitment (proposed by Maud Reeves and Beatrice Webb) to adult suffrage and ‘equal citizenship for women’ was adopted in 1907. Apart from that, The Rules and Basis of the Society was not significantly revised until 1919.

The Basis sets out the stall. It states that ‘the Fabian Society consists of Socialists’, that ‘Land and Industrial Capital’ must be vested ‘in the community for the general benefit’, that the social patrimony must be ‘equitably shared by the whole people’ (in Pease 1916: 269). Rent and interest should accrue to the people as a whole. A minority class should no longer be allowed to ride free.

The Basis was not clear on the trade-off between compensation and confiscation. Compensation would be in line with the rule of law. Without confiscation, however, the family fortunes of the past would roll over into the family fortunes of the future. The gap between rich and poor would initially remain the same. Fabians make haste slowly. Estate duties (first introduced in Britain in 1894) would over time complete the process of levelling down.

The Basis committed the members to ‘the general dissemination of knowledge’. They were expected, serving as a teaching order like the Jesuits, to sway public opinion and build a new consensus. In 1887, for one year only, a Fabian Parliamentary League was created under the chairmanship of Graham Wallas. Otherwise the Fabian Society preferred to permeate the existing parties, affiliated though they were to land and capital, rather than to transform itself into a third-force political party on its own. The Liberal Party was an obvious target. Sidney was on the Executive not just of the Fabian Society but the National Liberal Club. In 1919 the shifting loyalties came to an end when the Basis was rewritten to include a new clause: ‘The Society is a constituent of the Labour Party’.

The Basis sketched out the general direction. It was left to the Fabian Executive to put flesh on the bones. In 1887 Shaw drafted a mission-statement for the short-lived Fabian Parliamentary League. In The True Radical Programme he spelled out the changes that a Fabian socialist government would make.

Taxes on non-labour income would be levied at a punitive rate: ‘How high do we want to tax it? Twenty shillings in the pound … will satisfy us. But we will take an installment to begin’ (Shaw 1887: 7). The standard working day in the public sector would be capped at eight hours. The railways and the coalmines would be nationalised. Gas, water, the docks and the trams would be municipalised. Public money would flow to working-class housing, education and healthcare. There would be annual parliaments, adult suffrage (including votes for women), the payment of Members to encourage class-blind representation, the abolition of the House of Lords.

The new Britain would be a radically different country from the old. It would, however, take time. Darwin and, in economics, Marshall had argued that organic evolution is by its very nature slow, steady and incremental. Natura non facit saltum. The watchword would have to be festina lente and the role model the Roman General Fabius Cunctator.

Fabius had vanquished the invading Hannibal by waiting patiently for the right moment to strike and strike hard. He had invested prudently in the inevitability of gradualness. In the case of the Fabians who made him their mentor, the preferred weapons were research, reports, agitation, indoctrination, penetration, book-boxes, a youth club (the ‘Fabian Nursery’) for the under-30s, teaching sessions in Victoria Park, public lectures nation-wide, journalism (most prominently in the Fabian News and the Star) and Fabian Tracts which sold for one penny and sometimes were free. Sidney Webb was indispensable. Patricia Pugh says he could ‘never encounter a group of people without wanting to organize them into a useful working force’ (Pugh 1984: 66).

Some members were questioning the complacency of the ‘Old Gang’. H.G. Wells in ‘The Faults of the Fabian’ and A Modern Utopia had attempted to refocus the agenda of the self-appointed ‘Samurai’ at the top. G.D.H. Cole and S.G. Hobson had challenged their fellow socialists to devolve power from the state to the workers. In the event there was not much enthusiasm for a rebrand. By 1912 when Beatrice Webb was elected to the Executive it was clear that a departure from the settled pattern of ‘educate and wait’ (OP 71) was not imminent.

Yet something was missing and it was a Fabius. The Fabians never had and never wanted to have a star spokesman who would represent all that was best in their movement. The Fabians believed in the power of ideas. Ideas would be enough. It would not be a Fabius but the democratic median that would decide.

2 Sidney Webb: The Fabian Agenda

Shaw in The True Radical Programme spelled out his vision of a Fabian Britain. He will have discussed his proposals with the Fabian ‘big beasts’ Pease, Webb, Wallas and Sydney Olivier. Sidney in the foundry years that culminated in the canonical Fabian Essays was himself using his Tracts and his influence to stamp his mark on the Society.

Sidney made his own position clear. Fabianism is democracy: ‘Socialism is an exclusively Parliamentary force’ (SE 8). Fabianism is persistence. Socialists, like the Cunctator, must ‘watch and wait’ (SW 1894: 1). Fabianism is success. Society through ‘constant gradual evolution’ is even now ‘reforming itself on Collectivist, not on Individualist principles’ (SE 5, 16). Fabianism is persuasion: ‘What we as Socialists are aiming at is … to convert the great mass of the English people to our own views’ (SW 1894: 6). Victory is in sight. A proactive vanguard must nonetheless be there to give history a push.

Fabians have a duty to publicise, permeate and penetrate. At the same time, they must never become rabble-rousers or demagogues. Research and scholarship are essential if the way of evolution is to bend outside opinion to the facts. It was the logic behind Sidney’s Fabian Tract No. 5 on Facts for Socialists from the Political Economists and Statisticians.

Pease was describing Sidney’s Facts for Socialists of 1887 as ‘perhaps the most effective Socialist tract ever published in England’ still after 30 years (Pease 1916: 69). Revised several times to keep the information up to date, its message is binary. The factor labour is poor because the factors capital and land are rich. Profit, interest and rent accruing to idle predators who ‘take no useful part in the business of life’ (SW 1887: 4) sum up annually to £122 million. It is Two Nations. The cause is the difference in ownership of the productive base.

The poor sink into a way of life ‘not permanently advantageous to themselves or to society’ (SW 1887: 12). It is a cost without a benefit when the deprived live debilitated in back-to-back slums and die prematurely in the workhouse. Empathy and prosperity speak with a single voice in favour of the helping hand.

Socialists, because they believe in individual responsibility, give short shrift to ‘incorrigible vagrants and beggars’ who, in common with the predatory rich, scheme to transfer what they are too lazy to construct (SW 1887: 18). Indolent scroungers should be ‘severely supervised’, ‘denied all relief until they are willing to repay it by useful labour’ (SW 1887: 19). Myopic spendthrifts who ‘have made insufficient effort at thrifty provision’ (SW 1887: 14) should not expect to live well at their nation’s expense.

Some of poverty is undeniably self-inflicted. Most, however, is not. The bulk of destitution is a market externality. It is the living proof of a class-conflict of interest that is endemic to a failing economic system.

Industrial accidents are the unintended spoil of corner-cutting at work: ‘The “industrial martyrs” of our civilization … should be treated generously in the public hospitals’ (SW 1887: 18). Irregularity of employment is the unavoidable consequence of impersonal cycles: ‘The “temporarily unemployed” should be recognized as a necessary incident of our present industrial life’ (SW 1887: 18). The whirlwind of innovation displaces loser-labourers saddled with outdated skills: ‘At present there is no such consideration shown for the sufferers by industrial revolutions’ (CSC 289). Economy is upheaval. The whole derives the benefit. The part should not be expected to shoulder the cost.

The diswelfares of search and upheaval should not be left to lie where they fall. Uncontracted spillovers, Richard Titmuss says, are social overheads and third-party pollutants. They are ‘the product of a rapidly changing industrial-urban society. They are part of the price we pay to some people for bearing part of the cost of other people’s progress’ (Titmuss 1968: 133). Sidney Webb had said it before. Social policy is the return gift that corrects an uncompensated wrong. The poor are the collateral damage of Herbert Spencer’s self-correcting healing process. Not scroungers but victims, it is not the fault of the excluded that they have slipped beneath the wheels of dislocation and growth.

In 1887 Sidney Webb was calling upon the social organism not just to pay existing debts but to prevent future slips. There is only one way to do this. The elimination of destitution presupposes ‘the restitution to public purposes of rent and interest’ (SW 1887: 19). Socialism is more than welfarism. If the poor ex post are to escape the poverty trap, then land and capital cannot ex ante be left in private hands.

In 1889 Sidney returned to the social evil of fat cats who were not willing to share. In his Facts for Londoners (Fabian Tract No. 8), he declared that the reason why the deprived are hungry is that the Duke of Westminster is gobbling up their food. Instead of a ‘harsh and cruel desire to “save the rates” at the cost of human suffering’ (SW 1889: 17), the voters on behalf of the needy should vest the Duke’s assets ‘in the country’ and ‘for the general benefit’ (SW 1889: 3).

There should be collectivisation, ‘by purchase’ and ‘at a fair price’ (SW 1889: 33, 54), of private gas, urban transport and the water supply. There should be estate duties, progressive income tax and a levy on ‘excessive dividends’ such as would wrest back from the asset-owners the ‘private tribute wrung from the oppression of the workers’ (SW 1889: 33, 35, 55). There should be stealth taxes on ground rents, site values, vacant plots and rights of access. Fiscal socialism would be the thin end of the wedge. The power to tax is the power to destroy. In the long run the whole of landed property will be situated in the public sector where it can be devoted to the public good.

There are 27,379 children in London who ‘do not obtain enough food’ (SW 1889: 22). There are old people in the workhouse because their nation is refusing them a non-contributory pension. There are the uncompensated victims of industrial accidents, involuntary unemployment and yesterday’s skills. The facts are there for all to see. Public opinion, nudged by farsighted Fabians, will demand that the state put an end to ‘the barbaric individualism of the existing chaos’ (SW 1889: 22). It will insist that the absentee Dukes should delve and spin.

Public opinion will demand that unearned gains should be redirected into ‘services of public utility’ (SW 1889: 33). The list will extend to parks, roads, libraries, housing, clinics and (‘communism in funerals’ [SW 1889: 53]) cemeteries. The public involvement is never absolute. It cannot be. Circumstances alter cases. Subjective rather than objective, the leaders and their followers must move with the times.

Reforming liberals preach freedom to in the form of education and training. Socialists, Sidney was saying in his early Fabian Tracts, must combine the levelling up of vocationalism with the levelling down of socialisation. Socialism is ‘the only means’ of raising the living standards of the great masses (SW 1890c: 15, emphasis in original). The safety-net is not enough. Capitalism itself must go.

Riots and strikes in 1889 were a memento mori of what had happened in Paris exactly a century before. In 1890, in The Workers’ Political Programme (Fabian Tract No. 11), Sidney proclaimed that, using ‘gradual, peaceful, and constitutional means’ (SW 1890a: 9), the people should take ownership both of the means of production and of the machinery of state itself. The Members of Parliament should be a representative cross-section of the population. The experts should be sensitive to the views in the street. It would be double democracy, political and economic both. The people would then have ‘collective control … of the country in which they live’ (SW 1890b: 2).

The citizens have a duty to one another. Simultaneously, they have a duty to their descendants. A nation is a Burke-like intergenerational chain: ‘The future welfare of the State depends on the health and education of its fittest citizens’ (SW 1890a: 9). A short-horizoned present-day has no right to deplete the life-chances and common wealth that belong equally to coming cohorts as-yet-unborn. There will always be an England.

In English Progress Towards Social Democracy (Fabian Tract No. 15), the young Sidney Webb in 1890 drew all the threads together. Matter is in motion: ‘There is no resting place for stationary Toryism in the scientific universe’ (SW 1890c: 3). We are all socialists now: ‘The tide of Democratic Collectivism is rolling in upon us …. On all sides the sociologic evolution compels our adherence’ (SW 1890c: 3).

Adaptation once achieved must be handed on. Graham Wallas argued that novelty can disrupt the progression. Each generation, Wallas said, must begin ‘not where their fathers left off, but where their fathers began’ (Wallas 1919: 8). Sidney Webb was more confident about evolution. The irresistible is rolling in upon us. The ineluctable is not one choice among many. Rather, it is a natural monopoly.

The transformation will not occur all at once. Fabianism is small steps and hollowing out. All that can be said with certainty is that ultimately the ‘great evil’ of the ‘class monopoly of Land and Capital’ (SW 1890a: 11) will have given way to the ‘control of industry neither by individuals nor for individuals, but by the public for the public’ (SW 1890c: 10). It will be the negation of the negation: ‘Practically, the whole product of labour will be the worker’s and the worker’s alone’ (SW 1890c: 11). It will be the end of mankind’s prehistory. It will be the beginning of something new.

Like Marx, Sidney is styling himself a scientific socialist. Wishful thinking, he asserts, does not enter into his predictions. About to branch out from Fabian theory into historical documentation, Sidney was already projecting from the past into the next big thing. It would be socialism. Once the new institutions had settled in, there would no longer be any internal or external force that would cause them to mutate into something else.

3 Sidney Webb: The Fabian Essay

The Fabians took their lectures to church halls, political clubs and youth organisations throughout the country. Famous speakers like Shaw and Belloc pulled in the crowds and the press. Between April 1888 and March 1889 alone, the Society held over 700 public meetings.

In 1888 the Lecture Sub-committee decided that the time was right for a set of authoritative papers that would clearly delimit the Fabian way. The wave of strikes, the protracted depression, the primary poverty, the rise of socialist parties, the dissensus in British economics all meant that there was an unsatisfied curiosity into which the Fabians could tap.

The seven members of the Executive were each asked to give a one-hour presentation in London on the ‘Basis and Prospects of Socialism’. The lectures were repeated at Kings College, Cambridge, and in Newcastle. All the contributors were under 40. Sidney Webb at 30 was the youngest. Only Annie Besant (because of her campaign for ‘Malthusian’ contraception, her militant atheism and later her mystical theosophy) was well known outside the movement.

The contributions were published as a book in 1889. There was not much home-grown literature on socialism in Britain. There were Morris’ pamphlets, Hyndman’s books and The Religion of Socialism (1887) by Belfort Bax. Marx’s Manifesto had been published in English in 1848, Capital I (after 20 years) in 1887. The Fabian Essays would fill a gap.

The Fabian Essays were an English compendium because both of the language and of the culture. Proudhon’s intellectual baggage was French. Marx was the Philosophenweg. The Fabian Essays were grounded in local attitudes and unspoken assumptions. The contributors showed little interest in the world beyond their shores. Current affairs and public policy begin at home.

As was the tradition in the Society, the seven Essayists met regularly to discuss their drafts. They recognised that important topics such as the unions, the cooperatives and the local authorities, all of them close to Sidney’s heart, would have to be left for a further collection. It was to prove a long wait. The New Fabian Essays, edited by R.H.S. Crossman, was only published in 1952.

The Fabian Essays aroused considerable interest. By 1914 46,000 copies had been sold and there had been translations into foreign languages (McBriar 1962: 175). Royalties went to the Society. An American edition was published in 1894, with an introduction by Edward Bellamy. The contributors must have sensed that they were writing to last. Sidney Webb in 1890 described the Fabian Essays as ‘a complete exposition of modern English Socialism’ (SW 1890c: 38). Pease a quarter of a century later moved from socialism in general to Fabian socialism in particular: ‘To the Fabian Essayists belongs the credit of creating the Fabian Society’ (Pease 1916: 64).

Shaw was the editor. As well as his own chapter, he wrote the Preface and appended a lecture on ‘The Transition to Social Democracy’ that he had recently given to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

The first four papers dealt with the socialist core: ‘Economic’ by Shaw, ‘Historic’ by Sidney Webb, ‘Industrial’ by William Clarke and ‘Moral’ by Sydney Olivier. After that there were chapters by Graham Wallas on ‘Property under Socialism’, Annie Besant on ‘Industry under Socialism’ and Hubert Bland on ‘The Outlook’. The frontispiece was by Walter Crane. The cover was designed by May Morris.

Sidney’s essay on history took the view that history is ourstory. Steering clear of kings, queens, world-historical Napoleons and mould-shattering Strutts, Sidney regarded each of us as an atom in the All. His starting point, with Meninius Agrippa, was not the belly or the brain but the embedding matrix that gives to each supporting cell its identity and its function: ‘The individual is now created by the social organism of which he forms a part; his life is born of the larger life’ (FE 53).

We are all parts one of another. It is false consciousness to exaggerate the agency of the free-standing I. None of us is unblemished by the cocoon of context that shapes the wax with a non-personal mould. Sidney is enough of a liberal to accept that each individual is the proprietor of an irreducible essence, of a personal self that is more than the layers of Ibsen’s onion suspended in sterility. His point is that even the unique one-off is never sighted in nature except as a part of an enveloping compound. Everything depends on everything else: ‘A society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units …. It possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components’ (FE 53).

A society is an entity sui generis. A whole that is more than the sum of its parts, ‘its life transcends that of any of its members’ (FE 53). It is a lesson which each cog in the wheel, each organ in the organism, must take to heart. England prescripted us. Taking England out of the equation, each self-defining savage would be no more than the sum of his confusion and his ba-ba.

Because the social actor is situated in the thick of his social environment, it would be libertarian hubris of the highest degree to insist that his autonomy is separable from his predetermined rights and duties. The Totality comes first. We cannot do what we like with our own: ‘The perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine. We must abandon the self-conceit of imagining that we are independent units’ (FE 54).

We must abandon Mill’s economystical assertion that ‘over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’ (Mill 1859 [1974]: 69). In its place we must put the sovereign’s self-denying submission to the will of the pack, ‘to the higher end’, to ‘the Common Weal’ (FE 54). It is a call to action that we cannot refuse: ‘We must take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our own individual developments’ (FE 54). No one is free until everyone is free.

A healthy whole is the precondition for each healthy part: ‘Without the continuance and sound health of the social organism, no man can now live or thrive; and its persistence is accordingly his paramount end’ (FE 53). For each individual to ‘live or thrive’, the community to which he belongs ‘must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community’ (FE 54). Survival is tough. Survival of the fittest is tougher still. Natural selection is the selection of the best-adapted community. Laissez-faire anarchists who put ego’s narrow utility before the welfare of the team will find in the end that they will have to bowl alone.

Evolution is on the side of the macrocosm. Neoclassical individualists will not react well to Sidney’s contention that collectivism is wellbeing, eccentricity the primrose path to deprivation and decline. They will object that Sidney was too quick to dismiss the contribution that complementarity of interest and the serendipity of unintended outcomes can make to the health of the community and of the member alike. They will ask why there is no butcher, brewer or baker to serve us not from benevolence ‘but from their regard to their own interest’ (Smith 1776 [1961]: I 18). Sidney’s reply would be that it is in the nature of history to scale up to the whole. The persistence of aggregates, he avers, has been better supported by community-spirited self-abnegation than it would have been by self-seeking tradesmen bowling alone. It is belonging. It is what was what Beatrice once described as ‘the “higher freedom” of corporate life’ (OP 222).

No one understands the part who does not understand the whole. The whole, however, is humankind in flux. Social patterning, ‘without breach of continuity or abrupt change’ (FE 29), is forever transforming itself into something new. Matter makes matter. History is not so much the outcome of protocols, catastrophes and personalities as it is the perpetuum mobile of inexhaustible dynamics. History’s work is never done.

History is ourstory in the past. It is just as much ourstory-to-come. Returning from the store-room with the facts, the historian is in a position to grasp the teleology that lies behind the sustained unfolding. Sidney presents himself as a cautious determinist, a guarded futurologist convinced that things on balance are more powerful than thoughts.

Liars lie. The facts do not. Idealists trade in ought-to-bes. Psychologists trade in images and illusions. Scientists map out the trends. Scientists have documented ‘the irresistible momentum of the ideas which Socialism denotes’ (FE 28). They have shown that history is steadily advancing from unorchestrated autonomy into collective control.

Responding to need, the government is planting its footprint in regulation, inspection and registration: ‘Step by step the community has absorbed them’ (FE 45). The state is moving into the post office and the sewers. It is taxing the rich. It is relieving the poor. It is limiting the hours at work of women and children. It is introducing public health acts, by definition ‘wholly Socialist in character’ (SE 101). Public opinion is on its side: ‘Hardly anyone now objects to the extension of local government activity’ (SE 110). History is taking its course.

In economic life, the sole trader is being superseded by the joint-stock corporation managed not-for-profit by a hierarchy of salaried bureaucrats. It is private capitalism in name only. The ‘gradual substitution of organized co-operation for the anarchy of the competitive struggle’ (FE 33) is proving that order outperforms accident. The public sector has learned from the private sector that greed is not good. The consequence has been the ‘progressive nationalization or municipalization of industry’ (FE 45). Inefficient free enterprise is not up to the task.

Sidney is making assertions ex cathedra which he does not support. Methodologically, his essay is a justification of past-driven holism. Philosophically, it is a vision of the socialism that is yet to come. What it is not is empirical social science. Sidney makes no attempt to test his general impressions against a solid and representative sample of the facts that never lie. Not referencing the records and the annals, the examples and the instances, he nonetheless appeals directly to real-world experience to speak on behalf of his law of development. Sidney says that ‘the economic history of the century is an almost continuous record of the progress of Socialism’ (FE 29). It is methodology and it is philosophy. Well and good, but where is the evidence?

The science may be thin. Sidney, however, is convinced that it is robust. History has uncovered ‘the extent to which our unconscious Socialism has already proceeded’ (FE 47). Casual empiricism reveals that, at the present stage of economic evolution, ‘almost every proposal bears the Socialist stamp’ (SE 120). The counterfactuals are withering away: ‘Individualist principles have been abandoned’ (SE 2). Consciously or not, we are moving into a post-liberal era in which the Zeitgeist will be collectivist and only left-behind ideologues will preach the gospel that is gone (FE 49). Fabius will win; Hannibal will sink without trace. Sidney as a scientist has opened the box.

It is futurology but there is a proviso. Social change cannot be socialist change unless and until it is ‘acceptable to a majority of the people’ (FE 32). Politicians in a democracy respond to ideas ‘pressed upon them from below’ (SE 118). It is the weak link. If the median voter, like the dinosaur liberal, is opposed to the state, then superior statism will have to give way to inferior exchange. The people’s consensus is the Supreme Court.

It could all go badly wrong. Fortunately for the Fabian, it will not. Sidney reports that there has occurred a ‘gradual turning of the popular mind to new principles’ (FE 32). More than 40,000 copies of Looking Backward had been sold in England by 1890. One anecdote says it all. The democratic middle is moving into the progressive camp. Collectivism is imminent. It might even come in a single lifetime if that is what the average and the sensual select: ‘The economic side of the democratic ideal is, in fact, Socialism itself’ (FE 33).