Abstract
In the year 1890, Dilke, the former Liberal cabinet minister, and potential successor to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party, issued five articles in The New Review titled ‘A Radical Programme’. The ‘Condition of the People’, Dilke wrote in the first instalment, ‘is the general description of the topics to which the electorate seem inclined to turn with some impatience’. Dilke remarked upon the mutually reinforcing intellectual and political shift which, as we saw in Chap. 3, had first been set on course during the 1870s and 1880s. Dilke argued:‘Those who have stood still’, Dilke concluded, ‘appear to have grown Conservative.
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Notes
- 1.
See Roy Jenkins, Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy (London: Collins, 1958).
- 2.
Dilke, ‘A Radical Programme. Part I’, p. 2.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 4.
Ibid. For another parallel attack on the LPDL, and an effort to redefine individualism, rendering it compatible with socialism, see Grant Allen, ‘Individualism and Socialism’, The Contemporary Review, 55 (May. 1889), pp. 730–741. It is also worth noting here Engels’s remark to Bebel in July 1892. ‘The view that the Tories today are more favourable to the workers than are the Liberals’, he wrote, ‘is the reverse of the truth. On the contrary, all the Manchesterian prejudices of the Liberals of 1850 are today articles of faith only to the Tories’. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 49, p. 459.
- 5.
Charles Dilke, ‘A Radical Programme. Part II’, The New Review, 3/15 (Aug. 1890), p. 157.
- 6.
Hyndman, ‘Radicals and Socialism’, pp. 833–839. The Radical Programme (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), p. 13.
- 7.
Bevir , Making of British Socialism, p. 205. For an account of ‘Bloody Sunday’ see Thompson, William Morris, pp. 482–503.
- 8.
See Pease, History of the Fabian Society, pp. 111–112. McBriar strikes a note of caution, however, in accepting Pease’s account. Though ‘it can be readily admitted that the Fabians did much to help forward that Radical aspect of Liberalism of which the Newcastle programme was the much-acclaimed outcome’, he argued, it was not ‘Fabian in origin and inspiration’. Fabian Socialism and English Politics, p. 238.
- 9.
Dilke , ‘A Radical Programme. Part II’, p. 159. The ‘Socialist philosophy of to-day’, Webb posited, ‘is but the conscious and explicit assertion of principles of social organization which have been already in great part unconsciously adopted’. Enumerating his own Spencerian list of state interventions, ‘All this’, Webb went on, ‘has been done by ‘practical men’, ignorant, that is to say, of any scientific sociology believing Socialism to be the most foolish of dreams, and absolutely ignoring, as they thought, all grandiloquent claims for social reconstruction’. ‘Historic’, pp. 62, 81.
- 10.
Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, in Outlooks, p. 67. The lecture was first printed in Time in November 1890.
- 11.
See Freeden, The New Liberalism, p. 29. As Freeden observed, ‘Sir William Harcourt’s endlessly re-echoed phrase ‘we are all socialists now’ epitomised the new preoccupation of liberals at the end of the 1880s’. Ibid., p. 25. ‘We must assimilate Socialism’, ran an article in The Speaker; ‘if “Liberal” is not to become a mere shibboleth, a term as meaningless as “Democrat” or “Republican” in American party politics, we must take from Socialism what is good and reject what is bad or doubtful’. We quote no one; we express, nevertheless, the thoughts of many Liberals, unable to escape the influence of the atmosphere we all breathe, alive to the presence of new duties, perplexed as to their performance’. ‘The Socialism of Non-Socialists’, The Speaker: The Liberal Review (May 10, 1890), pp. 501–502.
- 12.
Shaw , ‘The Fabian Society’, p. 27. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 61–78.
- 13.
Dilke, ‘A Radical Programme. Part II’, pp. 158–159.
- 14.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, pp. 173–180. See Bernstein’s barbed remarks. ‘Amongst the Philistines: A Rejoinder to Belfort Bax’, in Tudor and Tudor (eds), Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 66.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 16.
Green, ‘Liberal Legislation’, p. 367.
- 17.
Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, p. 147.
- 18.
Ibid., pp. 147–148.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 147.
- 20.
See Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 19–20; and Henry Sidgwick, ‘Economic Socialism’, The Contemporary Review, 50 (Nov. 1886), pp. 620–631.
- 21.
John Offer, ‘Introduction’, in Spencer, Political Writings, p. xxii. Spencer did not, though, offer the routine remarks about Owen, St. Simon, and Fourier. See Charles Bradlaugh’s parallel articles, for example, ‘Socialism’, Our Corner (Mar. Apr. May, 1884), pp. 137–142, 200–205, 267–274.
- 22.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 77.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 66.
- 24.
Ibid., pp. 66, 73.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 69, 63.
- 26.
Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 67.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 69.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 69–70.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 70. In ‘On the Jewish Question’, for example, Marx argued against confusing ‘political emancipation’ with ‘the completed, contradiction-free form of human emancipation’. It was quite possible for the state to be ‘a free state’, he suggested, ‘without man being a free man’. Commenting on the French Constitution of 1793, ‘The practical application of the human right of freedom’, he wrote, ‘is the right of private property’. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, (1844) in Early Political Writings, trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 34, 45.
- 34.
Bax, Handbook, p. 389.
- 35.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 94.
- 36.
Hyndman, Socialism and Slavery.
- 37.
Paul Lafargue, ‘A Few Words with Mr Herbert Spencer’, To-day, 1/6 (Jun. 1884), pp. 416–427. On the ‘canonical status’ of Spencer’s book, Offer wrote: ‘To those self-styled ‘individualists’ anxious to roll back the state Spencer now became a mentor, with The Man versus The State their manifesto’. ‘Introduction’, in Spencer, Political Writings, p. xxvi.
- 38.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 95.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 101. Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 74.
- 40.
Ibid., pp. 74, 75.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Spencer , Man versus the State, p. 81. ‘There is a notion, always more or less prevalent and just now vociferously expressed,’ Spencer wrote, ‘that all social suffering is removable, and that it is the duty of somebody or other to remove it. Both these beliefs are false. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain. Saving men from the natural penalties of dissolute living, eventually necessitates the infliction of artificial penalties in solitary cells, on tread-wheels, and by the lash’. Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 81, 101. Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 81. Bax, ‘Man versus Classes’, p. 99.
- 45.
Spencer, Man versus the State, pp. 102, 103. Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 81.
- 46.
Ibid., pp. 81–82.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 49.
Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, p. 150.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 52.
Spencer , Man versus the State, p. 95. Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 87. It should be added here that Marx did not use the language of slavery in ‘On the Jewish Question’. He concentrated his attack, instead, on the ‘egoistic spirit of civil society’ that political emancipation, he held, effectively rubber-stamped. ‘Only when the actual individual man absorbs the abstract citizen of the state into himself and has become in his empirical life, in his individual labour, in his individual relationships a species-being,’ Marx argued, ‘only then is human emancipation completed’. ‘On the Jewish Question’, p. 50.
- 53.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 103.
- 54.
Bax, ‘Liberalism versus Socialism’, p. 87.
- 55.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 85.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 104. For parallel claims see Will Socialism Benefit the English People? Verbatim Report of a Debate Between H. M. Hyndman and C. Bradlaugh (London : Freethought Publishing Company, 1884), p. 14; and Henry George and H. M. Hyndman, The Single Tax Versus Social Democracy: Which Will Most Benefit the People? (London: Justice Printery, 1889), p. 27.
- 57.
‘Formerly the State was looked upon by the masses of the people in the light of an aristocratic or of an autocratic abstraction,’ Dilke argued, ‘whereas now it daily comes to be more and more looked upon by the people as a synonym for themselves … The very phrase “paternal legislation” has become inapplicable to the State Socialism of Great Britain and her Colonies, for a democratic people now look upon the State not so much in the light of a father as in that of a servant of their will’. ‘A Radical Programme. Part II’, p. 159. Will socialism benefit the English people?, p. 16. Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 76.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 77. For Spencer it did not matter if the state was a popularly chosen body, for ‘each member of the community as an individual would be a slave to the community as a whole’. Ibid., p. 103.
- 59.
‘A new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species’, Spencer explained. ‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘it is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defence League,” largely consisting of Conservatives has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism.” So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals … trample under foot’. Ibid., p. 79. For Spencer’s relationship with the LPDL see Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism’, pp. 770–771.
- 60.
Bax, ‘Man versus Classes’, p. 101. Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 79. See Address by the Right Hon. G. J. Goschen to the members of the Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh on Laissez-faire and Government Interference (London: Spottiswoode & Co, 1883).
- 61.
Spencer, Man versus the State, p. 79. Christopher Harvie, ‘Ideology and Home Rule: James Bryce, A. V. Dicey and Ireland, 1880–1887’, The English Historical Review, 91/359 (1976), pp. 298–314. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism, ch. 9.
- 62.
George C. Brodrick, ‘Democracy and Socialism’, The Nineteenth Century (Apr. 1884), p. 642. ‘Socialists’, Webb wrote, ‘are only advocating the conscious adoption of a principle of social organization which the world has already found to be the inevitable outcome of Democracy and the Industrial Revolution’. ‘The main stream’, he continued, ‘which has borne European society towards Socialism during the past 100 years is the irresistible progress of Democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered this truth into the reluctant ears of the Old World two generations ago’. ‘Historic’, pp. 64, 65.
- 63.
H. M. Hyndman, ‘The English Workers as they Are’, The Contemporary Review, 52 (Jul. 1887), p. 128. Bax, ‘Man versus Classes’, p. 104.
- 64.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 128.
- 65.
Brodrick, ‘Democracy and Socialism’, p. 629.
- 66.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 127.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 121.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid, p. 120.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Mill, Representative Government, p. 256.
- 72.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, pp. 127, 122.
- 73.
Mill, Representative Government, p. 336. Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 122.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 128.
- 75.
Mill, Representative Government, p. 214.
- 76.
Norberto Bobbio, Which Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy (Worcester: Polity Press, 1976), p. 99. Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 128.
- 77.
Mill, Chapters, p. 290. Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, pp. 123, 124.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 123.
- 79.
Mill, Representative Government, p. 226.
- 80.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48, p. 93. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, p. 206
- 81.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 124.
- 82.
Ibid. ‘The object of this Essay’, Mill famously wrote in On Liberty, ‘is to assert one very simple principle … That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’. On Liberty (1859), in Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 223. Mill’s ‘harm principle’ is discussed at greater length in the following chapter.
- 83.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘Individual Rights under Socialism’, in Outlooks, p. 144.
- 84.
Bax, ‘Individual Rights under Socialism’, p. 144.
- 85.
Ibid., pp. 144, 145. On the question of violence, Bax asserted, ‘The first element of truth in Anarchism is that force is as justifiable in the hands of revolution as of reaction, and that there is no inherent reason why it should not be successfully resorted to’; however, playing fast and loose with the subject of his criticism, Bax continued, ‘This Anarchism travesties in its cultus of violence as the sole justifiable method of working for revolutionary ends’. Ibid., p. 144. Bernstein echoed Bax in arguing that ‘the individual will be free’ under socialism, ‘not in the metaphysical sense dreamed of by the anarchists—that is, free from all duties towards the community—but free from economic compulsion in his actions and choice of vocation’. Preconditions of Socialism, p. 150.
- 86.
Bax, ‘Individual Rights under Socialism’, p. 145.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 145.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
Ibid., p. 146.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 149.
- 93.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 125.
- 94.
Ibid.
- 95.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 96.
For some potential sources of Morris’s libertarianism see James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), ch. 4. Ruth Kinna, however, provides a more reliable analysis in ‘William Morris and Anti-Parliamentarism’, History of Political Thought, 15/4 (1994), pp. 593–613. And Fiona McCarthy’s observations are, likewise, typically sound in William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
- 97.
Mill, On Liberty, p. 309.
- 98.
William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1893), p. 290.
- 99.
Ibid., p. 291.
- 100.
Ibid.
- 101.
Ibid., p. vi.
- 102.
Morris outlines his vision in chapters 11–14 of News from Nowhere. William Morris, News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (1890), in News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 2004). Vaninskaya, Morris and the Idea of Community, pp. 85–88.
- 103.
Bax and Morris, Socialism, p. 292. The latter principle was ‘a major feature of the SDF’s vision of the future system of government’. Bax, as we shall see, was certainly not in any way wedded to it, but he was probably responsible for its incorporation in the book he wrote with Morris. See Barrow and Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, p. 16.
- 104.
This was the term used by Engels, and later adopted by Lenin, to describe the process of transition. ‘The state is not “abolished”’, Engels wrote, ‘it withers away’. Socialism, p. 107.
- 105.
Bax and Morris, Socialism, p. 290.
- 106.
Bobbio, Which Socialism?, p. 61.
- 107.
Frederick Engels, ‘Introduction’, in Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, [1871] 1966), p. 18.
- 108.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘The Morrow of the Revolution’, in Ethics of Socialism, p. 84.
- 109.
Ibid.
- 110.
Ibid.
- 111.
Ibid.
- 112.
Ibid.
- 113.
Ibid.
- 114.
Ibid., p. 85.
- 115.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 116.
Ibid.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 85.
- 118.
Ibid., pp. 85, 86.
- 119.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 120.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 121.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘The Word of Command’, in Essays in Socialism: New and Old (London: E. Grant Richards, 1907), p. 78.
- 122.
Ibid. Collini, ‘Political Theory and the ‘Science of Society’ in Victorian Britain’, p. 204.
- 123.
Bax, ‘The Word of Command’, p. 75.
- 124.
Ibid.
- 125.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 126.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 127.
Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, p. 127.
- 128.
Bax, ‘The Word of Command’, pp. 75–76.
- 129.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 130.
Ibid.
- 131.
Ibid.
- 132.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 133.
Ibid.
- 134.
Ibid.
- 135.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 136.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 137.
Ibid.
- 138.
Ibid.
- 139.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 140.
Engels, ‘Introduction’, in Marx, Civil War in France, p. 16.
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Flaherty, S. (2020). Liberalism Versus Socialism: Republicanism, Rights, and Representative Democracy. In: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_10
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