The Making of British Socialism by Mark Bevir (review)

The Making of British Socialism, as its author acknowledges, has itself been a long time in the making. At its core are the dozen articles and chapters that Mark Bevir published on early British socialism between 1989 and 2002. Bevir provides an introduction and conclusion, and a new chapter that sets out “the Victorian context” from which the various strands of early British socialism emerged. The original essays were characterized by their author’s trademark clarity of thought and reluctance to suffer fools not just gladly, but at all. Since clarity of thought has never been at a premium among historians of Britain’s late Victorian socialist revival, and the subject has always attracted its fair share of fools, Bevir’s bracing interventions were widely praised. It is therefore welcome to see them brought together, and lightly reworked, in a single volume which seeks to spell out the full implications of its author’s argument not just about the nature of the socialist revival, but also its lessons for present-day socialists. Bevir’s reassessment of key facets of late Victorian socialist political thought remains compelling. Notable achievements include his subtle recalibration of the different strands of Fabian thinking in the 1880s and early 1890s, and especially the relationship between George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb; his emphasis on the theological doctrines that shaped ethical socialism, and thus the importance of an immanentist Christianity to many of its leading advocates; and his subtle exploration of the ways in which different radical traditions, some more republican, others more liberal, tended to feed into different types of socialism as key figures sought to make sense of the intellectual challenges of the late nineteenth century. Bevir shows that those steeped in republican radical traditions remained advocates of thoroughgoing democratic reform of society and state, while those emerging from radical liberal traditions tended to accept the existing mechanisms of representative government and had much less faith in the people as agents of progressive change, let alone socialism.

So far, so good; this is clearly an important intervention in the history of British socialist political thought. It corrects many misconceptions and simplifications about the various strands of early socialism, strands which for heuristic purposes Bevir organizes under three main headings: Marxist, Fabian, and ethical socialist (although he is at pains to stress that actual socialists often drew promiscuously from each strand, in the process generating many vibrant new cadet traditions of socialism). However, despite the new chapter exploring the broad Victorian context from which these socialisms emerged, there remains something fragmentary, even bloodless, about Bevir’s overall account of the emergence of British socialism in the 1880s and 1890s. Compared with the classic accounts by figures such as Stephen Yeo (on the religion of socialism) or David Howell (on the Independent Labour Party), one gets little sense from Bevir of socialism as a movement rather than just an exercise in political thought (perhaps surprisingly, one also gets little sense of how his approach to political thought differs from other traditions such as the Cambridge School or Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichten). Indeed it is striking how little the book engages with literature on the politics, rather than the ideas, of early socialism, and how little it has to say about why people flocked to the cause at particular moments, and abandoned it at others. Bevir does address the question of why some people began to turn to socialism(s) from the 1880s, but it is a rather broad, even mechanical explanation that can offer few clues to the periodicity of socialist enthusiasm across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. According to Bevir, two intellectual transformations (he calls them “dilemmas”) led people to question, and remake, inherited traditions of political thought in this period: the crisis of faith and the collapse of classical economics (3). These dilemmas recur throughout the book, almost like a Greek chorus, but it is far from clear whether they were as pressing for the thousands of activists drawn...