The Making of British Socialism by Mark Bevir, and: Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Lifeby Jonathan Sperber (review)

In the twenty-four years since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, a body of high-quality scholarship on socialism has slowly accumulated. Here I discuss two superb additions to this incipient post–Cold War canon, Mark Bevir’s The Making of British Socialism and Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. Both authors take it as axiomatic that the socialist utopia, with its quasi-eschatological promise of complete human emancipation, is an idea whose time has passed. But Bevir and, to a lesser degree, Sperber discern a utopian afterglow that warrants our interest—and is still quite capable of providing inspiration.

“This book has been a long time in the making,” Mark Bevir admits in the preface to The Making of British Socialism. We should be grateful that it was. Every passing day takes us further from the Manichean logic of the Cold War, which made disinterested scholarship on this subject virtually impossible. Moreover, the elapsed time has enabled Bevir to create a methodology that is unencumbered by the presuppositions of both the older, cultural Marxist historiographical tradition and the more recent, postmodern one. The result is the most important study of fin-de-siècle British socialism in decades.

Bevir aspires to write a new kind of political history “that shows how people actively made socialism by drawing on diverse traditions to respond to dilemmas and to inspire new practices” (3). The “dilemmas” of late Victorian Britain—most intractably, the crisis of religious faith, the collapse of classical economics, and the (perceived) onset of a severe economic depression—led a broad array of people to embrace the socialist cause in the 1880s and 1890s. But, Bevir maintains, the way that men and women understood their new creed was mediated by the cultural “traditions” in which they were nurtured—traditions such as evangelical Christianity, popular radicalism, and Comtean positivism. The range of traditions from which it drew its adherents means that socialism was—and is—irreducibly plural. Consequently, “there is no ‘true socialism’ against which to judge instances as proper or improper” (13). Indeed, one of the primary goals of this study is to recover a sense of the plurality and fluidity of socialism and to see what resources it has to offer our own historical moment. For Bevir, socialism’s most salient legacies are its commitments to “progressive justice, radical democracy, and a new life” (3).

The Making of British Socialism is divided into three parts, which tackle, successively, the Marxists, Fabians, and Ethical Socialists. Bevir shows that each of these three dominant strands of socialism assumed the form it did based upon the intellectual traditions of its proponents. (Thus the first British adherents to Marxism tended to be Tory or popular radicals, while the Ethical Socialists owed more to radical Nonconformity and American Romanticism.) All the major names one would expect to encounter are here—William Morris, the top-hatted Henry Mayers Hyndman, George Bernard Shaw—as well as relatively neglected figures such as Ernest Belfort Bax and John Trevor. Each is dealt with insightfully and occasionally, brilliantly. Perhaps most impressive is Bevir’s virtuosic recuperation of the Fabians’ leader, Sidney Webb, who is freed from long-standing aspersions that he was a latter-day utilitarian or, still worse, a soulless bureaucrat. Drawing upon Webb’s unpublished writings, Bevir convincingly demonstrates that Webb’s outlook was shaped by evolutionary and ethical positivism—and was more democratic than technocratic in intention.

Inevitably, there are areas in which this study is less impressive. The majority of The Making of British Socialism began life as articles in scholarly journals, and the material Bevir has produced to knit these discrete parts together is noticeably less developed. The prose, while clear, is rather flat; readers hoping for the literary brio of E. P...