Socialism and the Intelligentsia, 1880-1914

HISTORY WORKSHOP SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA M *, i m ■ f i t ' l l I "Ml, I W I É B I I ■ ^ ^ K 1880-1914 Edited by Carl Levy SOCIALISM A N D THE INTELLIGENTSIA 1880-1914 History Workshop Series General Editor Raphael Samuel, Ruskin College, Oxford Already published Village Life and Labour Miners, Quarrymen and Salt Workers Rothschild Buildings East End Underworld People’s History and Socialist Theory Culture, Ideology and Politics Sex and Class in Women’s History Living the Fishing Fenwomen Late Marx and the Russian Road Theatres of the Left 1880-1935 Poor Labouring Men Making Cars Language, Gender and Childhood The Worst Street in North London The Enemy Within Independent Spirits SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA 1880-1914 Edited by CARL LEVY Routledge & Kegan Paul London and New York First published in 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Published in the USA by Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc. in association with Methuen Inc. 29 West 33th Street, New York, N Y 10001 Set in Garamond by Input Typesetting Ltd and printed in Great Britain by T.J. Press Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall © Introduction and editorial matter Carl Levy 1987 © Routledge & Kegan Paul 1987 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism Library oj Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Socialism and the intelligentsia 1880—1914. (History workshop series) Includes bibliographies and index. Contents: Introduction: historical and theoretical themes!Carl Levy----- Sydney and Beatrice Webb! Royden Harrison ----- Max Weber and German social democracy! Wolfgang ]. Mommsen ----- /etc./ i. Socialism----- Europe------History. 2. Middle classes ----- Europe----- History, 3. Education ----- Social aspects----- Europe----- History. 4. Class consciousness ----- Europe----- History. I. Levy, Carl, 1931- ■ IL Series. HX238.S6 1987 33 3. 0094 86-31449 ISBN 0-7102-0722-0 ISBN 0-7102-1237-7 (pbk.) British Library CIP Data also available In memory of Frances Levy Book education and not skill is now the road to status and, with diminishing exceptions, even skill has moved into the world of diplomas. And, of course, the road into that world has been broadened. There was a time when miners might want their sons out of the pit at all costs, but engineers were content to offer their sons a presumably improving version of their own prospects. How many of the sons of toolmakers today are content to become toolmakers? . When the last men who have driven and cared for steam locomotives retire — it will not be long now - and when engine- drivers will be little different from tram-drivers, and sometimes quite superfluous, what will happen? What will our society be like without that large body of men who, in one way or another, had a sense of the dignity and self-respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work, which is also a sense of a society not governed by market-pricing and money: a society other than ours and potentially better? What will a country be like without the road to self-respect which skill with hand, eye and brain provide for men - and, one might add, women - who happen not to be good at passing examinations? E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, pp. 271-2 In our own time the division between high-born and base-born has become a fiction, transparent to every eye. But the distinction between the lowly manual world and the lofty intellectual one continues - no longer as lord and serf, but as officer and subaltern, party cadre and party member, expert and everyone else. Even after the rights of property have been unmasked, those of intellectual labour remain. R. L. Heilbroner, New York Review of Books, 5 November 1981, p. 52 Class antagonism within the ranks of revolutionary cadres remains the great unwritten history of nineteenth-century radical politics. R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge University Press, 1977. P- 253 Contents Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgments xiii / Introduction: historical and theoretical themes i Carl Levy 2 Sidney and Beatrice Webb 35 Roy den Harrison 3 Max Weber and German Social Democracy 90 Wolfgang J. Mommsen 4 Reformism and the ‘bourgeoisification’ of the labour 106 movement David Beetham y Education and self-education: staffing the early ILP 13 5 Carl Levy 6 Socialism and the educated working class 211 Jonathan Rée 7 Notes on three socialisms - collectivism, statism and 219 associationism - mainly in late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century Britain Stephen Yeo 8 Conclusion: Historiography and the new class 271 Carl Levy Index 291 ix Contributors David Beetham is Professor of Politics at Leeds University and an expert on modern European social and political theory. His most recent books are Marxists in Face of Fascism (1984) Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (2nd edn, 1985) and Bureaucracy ( 1 9 8 7)- Royden Harrison MA, D.Phil., FR (History) S. Formerly Senior Tutor in Industrial Studies and then Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. Professor of Social History, University of Warwick, 1969-82. In addition to being the co-founder and co editor of the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 1960-1982, Harrison has authored, edited and compiled five books in English apart from substantial works in Italian and Japanese. He contributed to both the first and second volumes of Essays in Labour History as well as contributing dozens of articles to academic and literary journals. Carl Levy is a Research Fellow at Eliot College, the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles and essays on Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci and Italian social history. Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Studied history, philosophy, history of art and political science at Marburg, Cologne and Leeds universi ties. Habilitation 1967 at Cologne University. Since 1968 Professor of Modern History at Dusseldorf University. Visiting professor ships at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, St Antony’s College, Oxford, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, and the University of Western xi Contributors Ontario, London, Ontario. Visiting Member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, 1968. From August 1977 to June 1985 Director of German Historical Institute, London. Publi cations include Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik (2nd edn, 1974; English trans. 1985), Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1967), The Age of Bureaucracy (1974) and Imperialismustheorien (1987). Co-editor of Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Jonathan Rée teaches Philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic in London. His book Proletarian Philosophers was published by Oxford University Press in 1984. His latest work, a study of philos ophy and literature entitled Philosophical Tales, has recently been published by Methuen. Stephen Yeo teaches History at the University of Sussex. He writes about the history of religion {Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, 1976), as well as about the history of working-class associations such as co-ops, friendly societies and clubs. He published an article on ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883-1896’ in History Workshop Journal, no. 4. He was active in the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, particularly the Brighton community publishing group called QueenSpark. He is particularly interested at the moment in the question ‘whose story?’ - in other words, not just the history of the working class but history as perceived by the working class; and he recently published an essay on this subject in the Journal of Contemporary History. A cknowledgments One of this volume’s origins was an Open University seminar held in London in November 1982. I should like to thank Adam Westoby and John Raynor for their support during my stay at the Open University. I would also like to thank all those friends and colleagues who lent help and criticism, particularly Chris Rootes, Jonathan Zeitlin, Stephen Yeo, James Joli, Jonathan Rée, David Beetham, David Sugarman, Pat Thane, John Breuilly, David Howell, Dylan Morris, James Young, Ron Eyerman, Elias Berg, Tobias Abse and Katrin Andersson. An extra warm thanks goes to Raphael Samuel, who encouraged the publication of these essays. Val Oswald, Joanna Snow and Linda Williams helped type sections of this book. Their assistance was invaluable. Royden Harrison’s contribution to this volume was first published in Nihon Rödö Kyökai Zassi (the monthly journal of the Japan Institute of Labour), Nos. 298 and 299, February and March 1985, Tokyo. I should like to thank its editors for their kind permission to republish it here. Although this book is a collective enterprise, I, needless to say, take full responsibility as its editor. Carl Levy xiii I Introduction: Historical and Theoretical Themes Carl Levy The expansion of the European middle classes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, together with their political signific ance, have recently been increasingly studied by social historians. Much of this, however, has been concerned with the propertied middle classes.1 At the same time students of contemporary social structures have devoted increasing attention to the role of the highly educated but unpropertied strata, East and West.2 Within the litera ture and its debate the relations between the educated middle classes and the origins and development of modern socialist organisations during the era of the Second International (circa 1880-1914) have been frequently commented upon, and occasionally examined in more detail in particular periods and contexts. There has never been a study examining the role of the educated middle classes generally* during this formative period for major modern socialist organis ations and movements. While socialist intellectuals of the period have been widely studied, this has largely been in biographical treatments or as the principals in doctrinal disputes and institutional histories.

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