Labour Revisionism and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931-79

Labour Revisionism and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931-79Author(s): Jeremy NuttallSource: The English Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 487 (Jun., 2005), pp. 667-694Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3489411 .

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English Historical Review Vol. CXX No. 487 doi:10.1093/ehr/ceil25 ? The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Labour Revisionism and Qualities ofMind and Character, z93z-79

CONTEMPORARY history is well endowed with biographical studies,' but the interest in the qualities of mind and character of particular individuals has not been accompanied by a consideration of the broader social and political significance of such qualities, or their absence. The levels of, for example, caring and intelligence of the twentieth-century citizenry, and the factors which have advanced and retarded them have tended to be discussed only by proxy. Thus, to learn about caring one reads a history of egalitarian thought, about intelligence, the history of an Oxford college. There are obvious reasons for this: qualities of mind and character are difficult to quantify; for the historian to consider a theme such as levels of caring seems dangerously like moralising;2 and explaining the limits or absence of things, as Ross McKibbin did in his illuminating essay on 'Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?', is a less conventional historical pursuit than explaining what happened.3 But the fact that historians have not devoted pages to addressing the question of, say, 'why was there not more caring in Great Britain?' exposes a bias against the consideration of both character and 'big themes' in history.

This bias is evident in writing on the history of the Labour Party. The dominant focus has been on individual life histories, elections, policy, factional rivalries and ideology.4 There have been hints of a consideration of qualities of mind and character. An interest in the ethical side of Labour's ideas informs the work of Peter Catterall, Martin Francis and David Marquand.5 Others, such as Lawrence Black, Steven Fielding and Stuart Macintyre have given specific attention to Labour figures' perceptions of the deficiencies in citizens' political attitudes and

I. A fact noted by Steven Fielding in The Labour Party: 'Socialism' and Society since 1y51 (Manchester, 1997), 167.

2. Geoffrey Foote, for example, in The Labour Party's Political Thought. A History (3rd edn, London, 1997), 193, criticises some of the Labour revisionist Evan Durbin's exploration of politics in terms of psychology, by noting that 'many radical psychologists would argue that we are all living in a neurotic society anyway, and that nobody is in a position to moralise'.

3. R. McKibbin, 'Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?', in The Ideologies ofClass: Social Relations in Britain z88o-195o (Oxford, 99go).

4. See the discussion of this in J. Nuttall, 'The Labour Party and the Improvement of Minds: The Case of Tony Crosland', Historical Journal, xlvi (2003), 133-53.

5. P. Catterall, 'Morality and Politics: The Free Churches and the Labour Party Between the Wars', Historical Journal, xxxvi (1993), 667-85; M. Francis, 'Economics and Ethics: The Nature of Labour's Socialism, 1945-1951, Twentieth Century British History, vi (1995), 220-43; M. Francis, Ideas and Policies under Labour 1945-5.: Building a New Britain (Manchester, 1997); D. Marquand, 'Moralists and Hedonists', in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (ed.), The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain (London, 1996), 5-28.

EHR, cxx. 487 (June 2005)



668 LABOUR REVISIONISM AND QUALITIES

public spirit, whilst David Howell has shown, through the example of the 192os, how the contrasting personalities of Labour figures themselves could impact in complex ways upon the party's fortunes.6 There are also parallel interests in the field of political philosophy, for example in the work of Kate Soper and G. A. Cohen.7 What remains lacking is a systematic integration of the theme of qualities of mind and character into treatments of the Labour Party's history.

In a previous article I have attempted to contribute to such an integration, by considering the case study of the ideas of Tony Crosland, and focusing on the qualities of caring and intelligence.8 This article attempts to broaden the focus, by examining revisionism as a whole, and exploring a wider range of qualities of mind and character: primarily, caring or altruism; responsibility; intelligence; ambition and entrepreneurialism; and constructiveness or moderation, but also: bravery, realism, competence and sensitivity. Clearly, some of these concepts, such as 'moderation' are as much about ideology as about character, and a central purpose of the article is to show interconnections between ideology and character, for example between egalitarianism and caring. The revisionists provide a discrete case study: they constitute a recognisable cluster of thinkers and politicians most influential in the Labour Party between 1931 and I979.9 They were most obviously united by their ideology and personal friendships, but they also held important shared views about the importance of intelligence and moderation in politics. Yet, the article also highlights the diversity, complexity and contradictions of the revisionists' ideas about the role of qualities of mind and character in their politics and ideology, and also that the attention they gave to this role was very unsystematic. Revisionist politicians, like Labour Party historians, half-realised the centrality of qualities of mind and character to the development of social democracy, without fully developing an exploration of the role of such qualities.

6. L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 195--64.

Old Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke, 2003); S. Fielding, "'To Make Men and Women Better Than They Are"': Labour and the Building of Socialism', in J. Fyrth (ed.), Labour's Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945-51 (London, I995); S. Fielding, P. Thompson and N. Tiratsoo, 'England Arise!' The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 194os Britain (Manchester, I995); S. Macintyre, 'British Labour, Marxism and Working Class Apathy in the Nineteen Twenties', Historical Journal, xx (1977), 479-96; D. Howell, MacDonald's Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922-193I (Oxford, 2002).

7. K. Soper, 'Socialism and Personal Morality', in D. McLellan and S. Sayers (ed.), Socialism and Morality (London, 1990); G. A. Cohen, If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (London, 2ooo).

8. J. Nuttall, 'The Labour Party and the Improvement of Minds', 133-53. 9. As with the Labour Party as a whole, historiographical work on the revisionists has tended

either to be biographical or to focus on issues such as economic policy, ideology, or the party's internal factional battles. Examples of the literature are: S. Crosland, Tony Crosland (London, 1983); S. Haseler, The Gaitskellites: Revisionism in the British Labour Party 1p95-64 (London, 1969); G. Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History (3rd edn, London, 1997); N. Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions (London, 1994); and R. Desai, Intellec- tuals and Socialism: 'Social Democrats' and the Labour Party (London, 1994).




OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 669 The article feeds into four central historiographical discussions relating

to the Labour Party. The first concerns Labour's relatively poor electoral performance in the twentieth century. Marquand noted in 1992 that the seventy-odd years since the party had become serious electoral contenders had witnessed only two decisive Labour victories.'0 The two landslide victories achieved since then were based on an adaptation to the public mood so considerable as to render Marquand's observation of continuing relevance. This article seeks to add to existing explanations of Labour's poor showing, based on factors such as the changing class structure, or mistaken policies, by suggesting that a lack of both realism and desire to exhibit governmental competence, accusations made by revisionists against the left, were also important. The lack of these suggested deficits of character as much as mistaken tactics; indeed failure to display these qualities was sometimes perceived by revisionists as a dereliction of 'duty'.

Secondly, there is the deeper question of why Labour failed not just to win elections, but to create a social democratic society by 1979. Fielding, Thompson and Tiratsoo refer to the Attlee governments' 'inability to make socialists on the scale anticipated in 1945',"1 and Macintyre writes of Labour's sense in the 1920S that 'the raising up of public mentality was the regulator of its political progress'.12 This article highlights how central a problem it was for Labour that it was not making enough socialists, and also suggests that there was limited coherence about what making socialists meant. It augments Ellison's history of egalitarian thought in the party by suggesting that the egalitarian society revisionists sought would require the existence of large numbers of individuals who cared about each other, a fact that revisionists sporadically perceived.13

Thirdly, the article is also relevant to discussions about blame in Labour history. Fielding notes that 'the sound of grinding axes is almost deafening when reading most studies of the party'.14 This is perhaps unsurprising given the failings identified in the previous two paragraphs. However, Andrew Thorpe has pointed out that 'local studies of the development of the Labour movement, and a new emphasis on the social and cultural history of the working class, [have] helped to suggest that, far from betraying a solid and at times militant following, Labour's leaders had in fact done well to go as far towards socialism as they had, given the flawed (in a socialist sense) material with which they had to work'." This article fits into this school of thought, though in a slightly

io. D. Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma (revised edn, London, 1992), viii. iI. Fielding, Thompson and Tiratsoo, 'EnglandArise!', 213. 12. S. Macintyre, 'British Labour, Marxism and Working Class Apathy', 484. 13. Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics. 14. Fielding, The Labour Party: 'Socialism'and Society, 20. I5. A. Thorpe, A History ofthe British Labour Party (Basingstoke, 1997), 4.





different way. It suggests that, given the flaws and strengths (in a quality of mind and character sense) of both the British citizenry and Labour leaders and activists themselves, then the history of social democracy between 1931 and 1979 simply was as it was. Everyone was constrained by their own inner limitations, agency constrained by structure, structure by a lack of agency and blame is thus inappropriate.

Finally, the article explores revisionism's attitude to qualities of mind and character in relation to its commitment to synthesis, balance and moderation. Martin Francis has shown how 'the pursuit of a modern rational order based on balance and proportion in speech and behaviour' was an important part of Labour's approach, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s.16 The revisionists placed great emphasis on their adherence to dry reason in contrast to the emotional idealism of the left, though they did not convert this belief in the importance of intelligence into a systematic plan to promote a 'learning society'. My exploration of the idea of synthesis in relation to the early revisionist, Evan Durbin, suggests that part of the reason for revisionist synthesis and moderation was an awareness that desirable qualities of mind, such as constructiveness, and the desire to promote them through society could be found on both sides of the political divide; and it was thus wasteful of the national stock of good intentions to indulge in excessive party political conflict.17 The pages below develop this further, contending that revisionists were con- scious that socialists could do damage if they believed that qualities of mind generally associated with the left, such as altruism or public spirit, existed in sufficient quantities amongst the public to provide the sole basis for a successful political project. Instead, they believed, Labour needed, however reluctantly, to work with and productively channel other, 'lesser' qualities of mind such as personal ambition and entrepreneurialism. In fact, they ought perhaps, in retrospect, to have done this with enthusiasm rather than reluctance, given the revelation in the I98os and 1990s that the alternative 'higher', 'socialist motives' such as caring and duty were probably even more difficult to generate than socialists had feared in the I950s.

Revisionism was evident in Labour Party thinking before 1931, not least in the writing of MacDonald, but it was a combination of the lack of detail in Labour's programme, made manifest by the economic crisis of 1931, and what was perceived as the alarming influence of Marxism amongst influential theorists such as Cole, Laski and Strachey thereafter

i6. M. Francis, 'The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint', in B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (ed.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945-1964 (London, 1999), 153-4.

17. J. Nuttall, "'Psychological Socialist"; "Militant Moderate": Evan Durbin and the Politics of Synthesis', Labour History Review, lxviii (Aug. 2003), 235-52.




OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 671 that sparked the systematic socialist rethinking in the 1930s by young intellectuals such as Evan Durbin and Douglas Jay. Their ideas on the relationship between qualities of mind and socialism were central to this early revisionism. This was especially true of Durbin, who as well as sharing the general interest of the left in Freudian ideas in the 1930s, shared a flat from 1929 with the developmental psychologist John Bowlby. Indeed, Durbin made the greatest use of psychology of all major Labour Party thinkers. His particular interest was in the connec- tion between people's motivations or emotions and what he saw as desirable political behaviour. Focused, in the 1930s and 1940s, on how Britain had managed to avoid dictatorship, Durbin reflected that the 'real source' of democracy was 'the existence of a tolerant disposition - a relatively friendly (loving) character in the people'.18 Achieving this meant paying greater attention to the 'emotional education' of children - Bowlby had written an article in 1940 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis on 'The Influence of Early Environment in the Devel- opment of Neurosis and Neurotic Character'. Durbin's The Politics of Democratic Socialism in the same year lamented that 'the social sciences have hitherto concentrated upon economical and political arrange- ments and have neglected the institutions more closely related to the formation of individual character', including the family.19 He believed 'it to be almost certain that if children were actually brought up more freely they would be much happier, much more reasonable, and much more sociable. It is obvious that social and international relations would greatly benefit if people were happier, more reasonable and more sociable.'20

For Durbin, the division between right and left was complicated by a division between 'constructive' and 'destructive' forces, which cut across it:

Society is ultimately made up of individuals - and is an enlarged picture of what they are - and in individuals there are two sorts of force at work: A. the positive & constructive forces To build - & live - & enjoy - to value & create & love In Conservatives - the Social Service and constructive economic enterprise impulses. In Socialists - the desire to build a better social order - & reliant productive power

18. Notes on 'Does Democracy Matter?', n/d, 1945-8, D[urbin] P[apers], 4/7, available at the British Library of Political and Economic Science.

19. E. F. M. Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism: An Essay on Social Policy (London, 1940), 76-7.

20. Ibid., 68-9.





B. the negative & destructive forces

To destroy & tear down and spoil - to kill[,] cause pain and wreck

In Conservatives - the 'shoot them down' brigade - and the Reactionary reigns of terror In Socialists - the 'Class hatred' (not a [love?] of justice) - and the Revolu- tionary reigns of terror.

These forces are in all of us - both forces - and in our national life - and it is the main task of politics - to see that the former forces are released and strengthened.21

This passage laid out especially clearly the reservations the revisionists were to have about an uncomplicated definition of socialism based on a particular economic system, or even a particular set of ideas: 'goodness' or 'badness' could emanate from both sets of economic systems and both sides of the ideological divide. Furthermore, society was unlikely to be much in advance of the individuals that comprised it. And central to the value of one's political contribution was what motivated one in making it.

Just as certain ideas have tended historically to be associated with particular ideologies, equality of outcome with the left, economic freedom with the right, so too with qualities of mind, for example, caring with the left, realism with the right. The revisionists, however, sensed, as Durbin's passage on constructiveness indicated, that 'good' and 'bad' could come from both left and right, that neither side had a monopoly of the promotion of desirable qualities of mind. And one desirable quality could undermine another. Durbin argued, for example, that 'a lack of imagination [a "left" quality] helps English people to maintain the physical courage [a "right" quality] they possess in such a high degree'.22 He sought to overcome this by synthesising var- ious desirable qualities of mind. Thus, it was necessary for socialists reluctantly to admit that malevolent action would sometimes have to be met not only by reason, but by force, and thus courage. Durbin stressed in 1937 that 'Democracy - which repudiates force - must be defended by force ... We must be gentle & reasonable but we must also be strong!'23 He in fact supported the 1938 Munich Agreement, but Jay and Gaitskell opposed it, Jay remedying his own previous unconscious assumption 'that monsters like Hitler could not exist in the real world'.24

21. 'Politics and Individual Life', n/d, DP, 1/7, 10-Ii. 22. E. F. M. Durbin, 'The Case for Socialism', in his Problems ofEconomic Planning: Papers on

Planning and Economics (London, 1949), 18-19. 23. Lecture notes on 'The Importance of Democracy', possibly c.1937, DP, 4/6. 24. D. Jay, Change and Fortune. A Political Record (London, 1980), 56.




OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 673 Given that the qualities of mind of politicians mattered, so too must

those of the citizenry. Douglas Jay's The Socialist Case (1937) is most discussed for its contribution to Labour's development of a coherent economic policy by the end of the decade, but the moderation of the economics, in the sense of the support for a mixed, rather than an entirely socialist, economy reflected a sense that the selfless motivations demanded by socialism were not sufficiently present. The book insisted that a socialist society 'is not a Utopia but a collection of normally self- seeking human beings', and 'the prestige of money incomes will with the mass of men be great'.25 Durbin was a greater believer than Jay in economic planning, and, though he also recognised the problem of people's motivations, instead of modifying his desired economic system, he argued that the self-interested motivations and the planning could co-exist, stressing in a paper of 1946 that the move to a more planned economy and social equality did not depend on the country's citizens becoming altruistic. He strongly welcomed altruism, but believed planning and equality could be pursued on the basis of 'normal economic motives'.26 Thus an awareness of the crooked nature of the timber of humanity did not always push revisionist socialists rightwards, though often it did. Equally, the limits to citizens' ability to make sensible, rational choices could point to a greater, rather than a lesser need for collective action. Part of the revisionist justification for an expand- ing state was that it could make decisions for people that they were not deemed qualified to make for themselves. Jay famously reflected in The Socialist Case:

Housewives as a whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things, where nutrition and health are concerned. This is really no more than an extension of the principle according to which the housewife herself would not trust a child of four to select the week's purchases. For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.27

Traditionally, the 1940s have been seen as the high point in Labour's history, not only in terms of central government policy, but also the apparently radicalised mood of the electorate. Recent research has suggested that this radicalisation was exaggerated.28 In any case, 'radicalisation', in the sense of supporting Labour, or even considering oneself socialist, was not necessarily the same as possessing the sort

25. D. Jay, The Socialist Case (London, 1937), 318. 26. E. F. M. Durbin, 'The Problems of the Socialised Sector' (1946), in his Problems ofEconomic

Planning, 71. 27. Jay, Socialist Case, 317. 28. Fielding, Thompson and Tiratsoo, 'England Arise!.





of generosity of character that was needed to make a socialist society workable. Revisionists were generally not persuaded that a better sort of person had emerged from the shared sacrifices of the 'people's war'. This was most evident in the case of Durbin who, at a Fabian conference on 'The Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism', in Oxford in September 1945, contended that, in the words of the conference report, 'people were far more wicked, ie mentally ill, than was commonly supposed or than would appear from their private acts. They put their wickedness into their social life; and as a whole we were all very sick and very stupid'.29 Given their desire to improve the quality of the citizenry, the sympathy of some socialists for eugenics before the full revelation of the events of the Holocaust is, on one level, unsurprising. In some notes on 'A Better World after the War', probably written in 1944, Durbin noted his support for selective breeding, shared at times by many socialists, including the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and Laski. Beliefs in eugenics were especially prevalent amongst Marxists and Fabians with, like Durbin, scientific interests.30 Durbin advocated '(a) negative eugenical practices - sterilisation of unfit (b) positive eugenical practices - artificial insemination', though he also noted that it would be a 'long way to changing opinion' on this matter.31 Durbin perceived a lack of intelligence not only in his fellow citizens, but also in his parliamentary colleagues. Writing during the first Attlee government, he claimed that there was a need for politicians who were 'intelligent, vigorous, incorruptible, Co-operative - or psychologically normal - and love their fellows, Understand the British people'. He suggested that 'we have a number of such people - not less than 20 - but not enough to form two Governments - and the standards among back benchers are deplorably low'.32 For the mainly middle-class revisionists, coming to learn at first hand about their comrades across the class divide was often a mixed experience, viewed initially with trepida- tion. Serving in the army in 1940, Crosland was 'rapidly making interesting discoveries about what the working class is really like'. In the mass, 'they are rather like a lot of wild animals', but alone they were 'almost as human (and a good deal more natural & spontaneous), as most middle-class people - & astonishingly generous'.33 However, he still wondered in 1946, whether 'there are more thoroughly bad than

29. F[abian] S[ociety] P[apers] G 49/10, 27 and 31, available at the British Library of Political and Economic Science.

30. See D. Paul, 'Eugenics and the Left', Journal of the History ofldeas, xlv (1984), 567-8. 31. DP, 4/7. According to the words of the report of a Fabian conference on 15 and 16 September

1945, Durbin argued that, 'in the matter of intelligence', 'selective breeding was probably the answer, though it would certainly create profound anxieties. But we could at least bring to bear negative eugenic tests': FSP G 49/10, 27.

32. 'Politics from Within', n/d, 1945-8, DP, 4/7. 33. Crosland to his mother, Summer/Autumn 1940, C[rosland] P[apers], 3/21, 5, available at the

British Library of Political and Economic Science.




OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 675

thoroughly good people in the world'.34 Jay's perception of the excep- tionalism of the war years related more to the cooperative attitude of party leaders within the coalition government than to changes in the attitudes of the citizenry as a whole: 'the war effort simply showed how much this country can achieve when virtually all the most talented people combine with a single purpose'.35

The picture was not simply one of left-wing romanticisation of, or revisionist realism about, the electorate. The revisionists and the left could often agree about the paucity of citizens' expectations. John Strachey contended in 1934 that 'the mass of mankind is today, as it has always been, cautious, conservative, and content with very little'.36 And the roles of realist and optimist could sometimes be reversed. Crossman claimed in New Fabian Essays in 1952 that 'there is far more to be said for the Christian doctrine of original sin than for Rousseau's fantasy of the noble savage, or Marx's vision of the classless society'.37 In I956, having read The Future of Socialism, he warned Crosland not to 'go in for such terrible self-deception as remarks about most people believing in equality'.38 The left, who prided themselves on their hard-headed belief in the need to focus on the politics of economic power, could also expose the revisionists' sometimes excessive confidence in people's susceptibility to reason. Harold Laski had observed in 1925 that 'the part played by reason in politics is smaller than we have been content to suppose',39 and, writing to Durbin at the time of the publication of The Politics ofDemocratic Socialism in early 1940, he now told him: 'you do not grasp the dynamics of power'. He added:

I believe you unduly underrate the difficulties of a change of social system because you do not realise how deeply those who rule today are convinced that their well-being is the condition of social well-being. And when you produce our programme and say 'But see how reasonable this really is', you convince people like me but I don't think you convince people like them.40 David Marquand has drawn a useful distinction between a 'passive-

hedonistic' approach to politics, in which 'individuals pursue their own preferences without interference from others', and a 'moralist-activist' one, in which 'individuals learn to adopt higher preferences in place of lower ones'. He sees these as having alternated in post-war British political history, Beveridge's, Attlee's and Cripps's moralist-activist

34. Diary entry, 31 Mar. 1946, CP, I6/1, 4. 35. Jay, Change and Fortune,

lo6. 36. John Strachey, The Rotarian, Dec. 1934, S[trachey] P[apers], held privately, contact Histori- cal Manuscripts Commission. Box on Contracts, Articles and Reviews etc., no. I. Bryan Magee noted similarly in 1962 that 'most people accept their environment as they find it, adapt themselves to it, live in its terms': B. Magee, The New Radicalism (London, 1962), 17.

37. R. H. S. Crossman, in R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (London, 1952), 8. 38. Crossman to Crosland, 23 Oct. 1956, CP, 13/10, 3. 39. H. J. Laski, A Grammar ofPolitics (London, 1925), 16. 40. Laski to Durbin, 17 or 19 Feb. 1940, DP, 7/6.





vision in which rights and duties went hand in hand, being replaced by revisionist social democracy, which focused instead on technical economic management, and in which 'equality came to be seen as a good in itself, irrespective of the uses to which the fruits of egalitarian policies were put'.41 Revisionists did indeed tend to avoid expressing a vision of a better society in terms of the more plentiful existence of individual moral qualities. In reaction against both the puritanical excesses of their late Victorian parents and the restrictionism of British laws on censorship and divorce, they stressed the promotion of individual liberty more than the importance of duty. The hedonistic excesses of revisionist reaction sometimes led to their own unhappiness, which itself partly explains their reluctance to be visionaries, in the sense of prescribing, as William Morris had done, the route to a happier society for others.42 This was most obvious in the case of Crosland, who, for all his famous criticism of the Webbs' asceticism, acknowledged in 1949 'that they had achieved (tho' B.W. [Beatrice Webb] only after great struggles) a happiness & peace of mind that was far beyond my powers & comprehension' and indeed 'that they were saintly where I was sinful'.43 Ever the empiricist, he insisted in 1956 that 'we still know too little about the relation between personal happiness and the cultural-social background to be sure what influence changes in the latter will have on the former'.44 Crosland's determination in the 1950os to show that he had escaped from the restrictions of his Plymouth Brethren upbringing manifested itself in a combination of hedonism and individualistic iconoclasm which also explains The Future of Socialism's (1956) explicit rejection of 'the co-operative aspiration'.4 Jay did not share Crosland's reservations about cooperation, agreeing with Morris that 'Socialism is Fellowship'.46 However, none of the leading revisionist works placed morals at the centre.

There was a tendency to equate what were considered attractive qualities of mind with some specific social objective or philosophy and then to assume that commitment to the philosophy would also advance the quality of mind. Thus, when Bryan Magee argued in 1962 that 'caring about other people is the emotional basis of radicalism',47 he could go on to argue that 'if you really care about people and regard them as the only ends, you will want a huge increase in, quite simply, equality'.48 In revisionism as a whole, the promotion of equality often substituted

41. Marquand, 'Moralists and Hedonists', 20-3. 42. William Morris supposed in 1887 'that the realisation of Socialism will tend to make men

happy': William Morris, 'The Society of the Future', lecture, 13 Nov. 1887. 43. Diary entry, 4 Sept. 1949, CP, 16/i, 52. 44. C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), 206. 45. Ibid., Ios, 111-12. 46. D. Jay, Socialism in the New Society (London, 1962), 3. 47. Magee, The New Radicalism, 59. 48. Ibid., 63.





for the promotion of caring to a degree that was not always beneficial to the advancement of the latter. Here, revisionists were part of a broader socialist tradition, which thought it futile and indulgent to preach about individual morality, when large-scale reforms through the state could apparently bypass the need for people to improve their inner selves.49 Revisionists were also reluctant to moralise. Durbin noted in the mid- 1930s that socialists must accept people 'as they are'.50 Roy Jenkins argued in 1959 that 'generally speaking, those who themselves enjoy living standards which are above average should be extremely cautious about pointing out to others the corrupting effects of the motor-cars or the refrigerators which they themselves have long possessed'.51 This was partly a reaction against the left's sometimes unselective condemnation of consumer affluence, witnessed in Richard Crossman's 1960 concern, in the context of the cold war, that 'the luxuries, gadgets, entertainments and packaged foodstuffs which so many workers enjoy in our Affluent Society' could be regarded by those in developing countries 'as irrelevant and even vulgar and immoral, compared with the solid respectability of the Communist way of life'.52 Hence, the extremism of Crosland's assertion at an international seminar in Tokyo in April 1972, that 'there is nothing immoral about working class materialism',53 or Bryan Magee's collective description in 1962 of 'sabbatarians, vegetarians, teetotallers' as 'people who tint with grey everything they touch'.54 Jay later reflected that his generation 'were too afraid of being accused of moralizing and preaching'.55 This fear encouraged revisionist focus on a technical rather than a moral agenda. Jay himself wrote in 1962: 'Western man is not naturally superior in intelligence, character, morals, health or physique, to any other man. ... But Western man is superior in technical knowledge, political experience, and industrial capacity.'56

Yet it would be wrong to suggest that revisionism lacked a moral dimension. It inherited a long-standing, unapologetic socialist tradition of seeking to 'civilise'. Jenkins, for example, made it clear in 1953, that 'part of the mission of the British Labour Party must be to civilise (so far as international politics are concerned) both its opponents at home

49. Tony Benn's socialism, for example, in his words, owed 'much more to the teachings of Jesus ... than to the writings of Marx', yet he argued that socialists 'do not believe that priestly injunctions restricted to matters of personal conduct, "Be good" or "Be Kind", are any substitute whatsoever for the fundamental reforms that require collective political action': T. Benn, Arguments for Democracy (London, 1981), 130, 128.

5o. Notes on 'Socialism and the Liberal Tradition', 1935-6, DP, 4/6. 5I. R. Jenkins, The Labour Case (Harmondsworth, 1959), 55. See also C. A. R. Crosland, The

Conservative Enemy (London, 1962), I29: 'a pharisaical attitude to the lives of others is revolting'. 52. R. H. S. Crossman, Labour in the Affluent Society, Fabian Tract cccxxv (June I96O), 13. 53. CP, 4/12, 4. 54. Magee, The New Radicalism, 144. 55. Jay, Change and Fortune, 498. 56. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, io6.

EHR, cxx. 487 (June 200zoo)




and some of its allies abroad'." Revisionists also inherited, both from their parents and from the labour movement, a strong sense of the need to fulfil duty through holding public office and working long hours, which may have contributed to both Gaitskell's and Crosland's early deaths.58 There was also a moral emphasis more distinctive to revisionism: its stress on individual agency over structures, techniques and material forces. The revisionist rejection of the primacy of nationalisation left a space for a more ethically based definition of socialism. Crosland stressed in 1950o that 'the ultimate ideal of Soc.[ialism] seems to me essentially a moral & not a material one'.59 He contended in 1956 that the difficulty of economic planning lay less in 'the lack of statistical information' or 'the administrative machinery of planning' than in a lack of 'will-power and determination': 'if socialists want bolder planning, they must simply choose bolder Ministers'.6o Jay insisted in 1962 that the obstacle to superpower disarmament 'is in the minds of men (and not just politicians only) rather than in the technical complexities'.61 Barbara Castle, reviewing Crosland's The Conservative Enemy (1962), complained that 'he devotes his considerable activity and expertise to proving that we can get rid of the evils without changing what Socialists have always believed to be the source of those evils: the private ownership of the means of production and their deployment in obedience to the profit motive'.62 This illustrates the way in which the left was both more and less focused on morals than the revisionists were: more, in the sense of its greater attention to the dangers of the profit motive, less in its mechanistic tendency to reduce 'evils' to the structure of industrial ownership.

Nevertheless, revisionism was more at ease with an emphasis on the importance of iconoclastic intelligence than on individual moral responsibility. The original, German socialist revisionist, Eduard Bernstein, admired by Crosland, set a precedent, arguing in 1899 that 'when the working classes do not possess very strong economic organ- isations of their own, and have not attained, by means of education on self-governing bodies, a high degree of mental independence, the

57. R. Jenkins, Pursuit of Progress: A Critical Analysis of the Achievement and Prospect of the Labour Party (London, 1953), 48.

58. Gaitskell, speaking at a dinner given in honour of Earl and Countess Attlee, expressed his admiration for Attlee's 'never to be forgotten virtue - the virtue of devotion to duty', IO Feb. 1956, G[aitskell] P[apers], AII7, available at University College London. Crosland spoke of the 'perma- nent puritan conscience about certain things which I still have, about work in particular': BBC radio interview, 1973, CP, 13/36.

59. Notes for speech to South Gloucestershire selection meeting, CP, 13/21, 9. 60. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, 502-3. See also his call for 'a move to the Left' in his Socialism

Now (London, 1974), not in the form of 'old-fashioned Clause 4 Marxism', but of 'a stronger determination' to achieve egalitarian priorities.

61. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 97. 62. B. Castle, Tribune, 23 Nov. 1962.

EHR, cxx. 487 (June 2oo5)




dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of club orators and writers'.63 A key definition of revisionism was that the rationalism which socialism had inherited from the Enlightenment should dictate an attachment by the Labour Party to rational, intelligent, self-critical thought, not simply 'rational' economic planning. David Marquand has observed 'a fact about British politics which, when I was an under- graduate in the '50os, had almost assumed the status of a law. The Tories were the stupid party. The cleverer you were, the more likely it was that you voted Labour.'64 This seemed to be indicated by the large number of those with First Class Oxford degrees in Wilson's 1964-70 Cabinets, including the revisionists, Jay, Crosland and Jenkins. Jay declared his love for 'unrelenting, merciless logic',65 and Magee saw 'the pursuit of truth' as 'a radical activity'.66 Gaitskell famously responded to Jean Monnet's urge that he 'have faith' in the European integration project with the words: 'I don't believe in faith, I believe in reason'.67 The revisionists saw themselves as rationalists against the left's romanticism. Gaitskell partly defined a communist as 'somebody who was simply not prepared to follow the logic of the argument to its proper conclusion'.68 'By calculated lucidity and unadorned rational argument', Jay wrote of Gaitskell, 'he in the end produced a more emotional conviction than rhetoric could achieve'. In contrast, 'Bevan's most splendid speeches entertained, impressed, even enthused. But when one inquired of his hearers next day what he had said they were often not at all sure.'69

But revisionists did not systematically integrate any concept of a 'learning culture' or a 'thinking society' into their socialist vision. The equal right to cleverness was not a revisionist rallying cry. They prized intelligence and they believed in socialism, but did not explore in depth the connections between the two. In part this reflected their preoccupation with day-to-day politics, in part a trace of characteristically British anti- intellectualism which meant that they did not see only benefits in multiplying the number of thinkers. Crosland spoke of 'the lack of.... practical wisdom amongst so many contemporary intellectuals',70 and

63. E. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York, c.I963), 149, 218-19.

64. D. Marquand, 'Inquest on a Movement: Labour's Defeat and its Consequences', Encounter, liii (July 1979), 9.

65. Jay, Change and Fortune, 31. When the young David Marquand arrived at Oxford in 1954 his watchword was Reason with a capital "R"': D. Marquand, The New Reckoning: Capitalism, States, and Citizens (Cambridge, 1997), 8.

66. Magee, The New Radicalism, 38. 67. B. Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell (London, 1996), 412. 68. Diary entry dictated on 14 Feb. 1956, in The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell 1945-1956 (London,

1983), ed. P. M. Williams, 44o. Crosland suspected that 'sustained thinking is a minority occupa- tion amongst Ministers', noting though that 'I've always found it very helpful!': M. Kogan (ed.), The Politics ofEducation: Edward Boyle andAnthony Crosland in Conversation with Maurice Kogan (London, I971), 157.

69. Jay, Change and Fortune, 247. 70. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, 269-70.





Jay noted that his Battersea constituency Labour Party was always 'blessedly free' from 'theorists'.71 Jay also held 'the persistent leaning of our educational system - and perhaps of the British character itself- towards the humanities and the professions rather than industry and business' as partly responsible for Britain's low industrial productivity.72

In the first half of the 195os and in the early I96os revisionists and the left fought for control of Labour's leadership, institutions and policy. As Kenneth Morgan has put it, 'for a party supposedly dedicated to the concept of the brotherhood of man, the Labour Party has had a singu- larly unfraternal history'.73 It is little noticed by historians that this has implications for the seriousness and credibility of Labour's claim to have been seeking a more cooperative and harmonious society. If Labour was itself unfraternal, its quest for a fraternal society was likely to be problematic. According to Ian Mikardo in 1960, 'contrary to what some people think, the great majority of the party's members, on both wings are reasonable people who are willing to forego some of their demands in order to reach agreement whenever that is possible'.74 But it is likely that the intensity of the conflicts over these years is explicable as much by a dearth of 'reasonableness' as by the existence of two competing rational arguments.

Revisionists saw the left as the more heated of the two factions, for all Gaitskell's occasional impassioned speeches. Bevan himself argued that 'if you want to convert people to your own opinion it is no good whispering what you want to say', and Barbara Castle's autobiography was appropriately entitled FightingAll The Way.75 Martin Francis notes that for Labour in the late 1940s and early 1950os 'self-discipline was considered a vital requirement for effective public service and displays of unfettered emotion in politics were regarded as inappropriate'.76 Hence, revisionists resented Bevan's unpredictability and readiness to resign. It was not simply that they disagreed with him ideologically, but that he seemed prepared to undermine their attempts to present Labour as competent and sensible. In its commitment to ideas of constructiveness and moderation in politics, revisionism attempted to construct a motivation for socialism based on building on the positives of existing society, and to move away from the tendency to focus on negatives that

71. Jay, Change and Fortune, 157. 72. Ibid., 504. 73. K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945-I95I (Oxford, 1985), 45. Roy Jenkins recalled that in

the 1950s the minds of Bevanites and Gaitskellites 'were occupied with hostility more to each other than to the Conservatives': R. Jenkins, A Life at the Center (New York, 1992), 85. For our purposes it is the existence of the hostility itself which is most interesting.

74. Ian Mikardo, Tribune, 5 Feb. I96o. 75. Aneurin Bevan, 'Destroy the Tory Challenge', Tribune, 5 Oct. 1951; B. Castle, Fighting All

The Way (London, 1994). 76. Francis, 'The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint', 153.

EHR, cxx. 487 (June 2oos)



OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 68I had sometimes characterised a socialist attitude in the pre-war years of more extreme material poverty. Bryan Magee noted in a chapter on 'The Psychology of Politics' in his The New Radicalism (1962) that Labour, because it laid blame on the existing form of society, became a natural point of attraction for 'the lonely, the poor, the envious, the vindictive'. These people were in the Labour Party 'not to change society or help other people but to meet psycho-emotional demands of their own. Their Socialist attitudes are neurotic symptoms.'77 The characteristic revisionist emphasis on a mixed economy rather than on further large- scale nationalisation reflected their sense that the pursuit of the latter was more about satisfying a personal quest for purity than sincerely trying to meet real needs. Especially in the 1950s, revisionists aimed to acknowledge and build on the strengths of the age of affluence and full employment rather than to seek to rebuild the country, along socialist lines, from scratch. Hence Crosland's call in The Future of Socialism (1956) for 'a purposeful, constructive, and discriminating determination to improve an already improved society'.78 Roy Jenkins observed that 'only a very prejudiced man would claim that everything was wrong with the Britain ofi959'.79 Rather than being prejudiced, Jenkins thought it better to be 'rather moderate', 'sensible' and 'objective-minded'.80

However, as hinted earlier, this was not to say that revisionists believed that the electorate possessed these qualities. In general, the revisionists' realism about the motivations of the citizenry tended to push them towards the political centre, reflecting a sense that large-scale measures such as nationalising a significantly higher proportion of the economy would not result in comparably large improvements in the 'spirit' of those working in these industries. The left tended to stress the willingness of the electorate to be educated into being socialists, Barbara Castle suggesting in I960 that people 'are more ready to listen than we think', and Crossman in the same year expressing his preference for 'political education' rather than 'public relations gimmicks'.8" The revisionists sought to avoid exaggerating the current level of civilisation of the citizenry. Gaitskell was critical of 'armchair politicians who, not understanding what the British electorate was really like, were for ever making bad political judgements'.82 Magee noted in 1962 that

77. Magee, The New Radicalism, I25. 78. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, II6. 79. Jenkins, The Labour Case, 9. 80. Ibid., 7, 9, 35, 82. 81. Barbara Castle, 'Open Letter to Tony Crosland', New Statesman, 24 Sept. 196o. There was a

tendency for the left to see manipulation by the 'dlites' as a bar to the flowering of the goodwill of the people. Richard Crossman, 'Propaganda and Prosperity', New Statesman, ii June 1960. Tony Benn argued in 1981 with regard to the 'false analysis' that democracy was threatened by anti- democratic socialists that 'it was a measure of the power and influence of establishment propaganda ... that many good people have been persuaded to accept' it: Benn, Arguments for Democracy, xii.

82. Proof copy of Gaitskell's Foreword (Dec. 1953) for reprint of Durbin's The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1954), 9, G[aitskell] P[apers], A124, available at University College London.





'working-class people are, on the whole, more rigid and intolerant than better-educated people, narrower in outlook, more conservative in their social attitudes'. He pointed out that that this was because of the limits to their education and leisure, and their poor housing, which had 'damaging effects on the personality'. Indeed, were the effects of these things on the personality other than negative, the case for social reform would disappear. This was 'why idealization of the working class is silly'.83 Mayhew confirmed the existence of this idealization, noting that he and fellow Oxford student socialists in the 1930s had seen the 'workers' as 'the victims of injustice', but also 'the "wave of the future" and in some degree, obscurely, morally superior to our bourgeois selves'.84 Jay reflected in 1962 that 'even amongst the intelligent and well-educated (experience unhappily shows), it is only the exceptional, disinterested, altruistic individual who cares about his less fortunate neighbour getting a pension, a house, a good education, or adequate legal advice, if he has already secured these for himself and his family'.85

If there was a gulf between the high levels of character demanded by socialism and the actual character of the British people, the gulf was seen to be even greater in relation to citizens in other countries. In conducting its foreign policy, Jenkins wrote in 1953, Britain had to 'live in an evil world'.86 Indeed, in relative terms, the revisionists had a positive view of the British citizenry. To Crosland in 1944, for example, the English were 'the most genuinely kind, warm-hearted and generous race I have yet met'.87 Revisionists' perceptions of the people were thus by no means wholly negative. Their optimism, and their belief that the left exaggerated the evils of the contemporary economy and society, and of the growing commercialised culture, made them wish to focus on some of the positive trends relating to the quality of citizens' minds. This was most evident with regard to the state of culture. To Crosland in 1956 it was 'clear from attendance figures at art galleries and concerts, the number of books borrowed from public libraries, the sales of peri- odicals, and the week-end crowds at Longleat and Luton Hoo, that some of the recent extra income and leisure has been well spent'.88 Jay noted in 1962 that 'the attendance at concerts providing serious music is far greater than before 1939'.89

Michael Foot contended in 1960 that the revisionists believed that 'the only way to win the waverers is to make a deliberate appeal to their interests and sympathies'.90 But no electorally serious party could afford

83. Magee, The New Radicalism, 1x6. 84. C. Mayhew, Time to Explain (London, 1987), 32. 85. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 221. 86. Jenkins, Pursuit ofProgress, 5o. 87. Diary entry, 12 July 1944, CP, 3/I, 5I. 88. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, 243. 89. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 350. 90. M. Foot, 'The Future of the Left', Encounter, xv (July 1960), 69.





to ignore the reality of voters as they were. Furthermore, a sense that the attitudes of the citizenry were not as 'advanced' as socialists would hope was one reason why some Labour Party figures moved from the left to a more revisionist position. Though Bevan would not have defined himself as a revisionist, one reason for a certain disillusionment in his last years was his sense that the working class had been seduced by consumer goods away from socialism.91 John Strachey, who did move progressively from a broadly Marxist position in the 1930s to a broadly revisionist one, noted in 1961 that communists assume 'that the vast majority of the wage earners ... wishes to end the capitalist system and set up a socialist or communist system. Well, ... I wish that the over- whelming majority of all wage earners everywhere felt like that. But it is evident to me that in fact they do not.'92 Often, though, left and revisionists alike chose to ignore the tension between their ideology based on the common good, and the strong appeal of self-interest. Jay insisted in 1962 that 'idealism and social responsibility will still have their appeal in Britain, provided they are applied to real and contemporary issues', and claimed that 'there is no dilemma whatever between Socialist principles and the mood of the public'.93

Turning to the methods and means adopted by revisionists to achieve their objectives, it is worth reflecting, initially, on their overall choice of politics as the mechanism through which to achieve socialism. On one level, this was an obvious way to access certain centres of power, but it also reflected a preference for action, events and tangible victories, perhaps sometimes to the detriment of a quieter reformism of education and personal example. Gaitskell was 'scornful of those who were content only to talk': he 'wanted to get results'.94 Jenkins reflected in 1992 that in politics 'I have had substantially more influence on the course of events [my italics] than I could have had in any other way of life'.95 Crosland chose a political over an academic life partly so as 'to have a job in which you don't just write about things, but you actually can do things'.96 The choice of politics nevertheless also reflected a long-standing socialist belief that responsibility and participation were themselves good educators. Magee wrote in 1962 that 'innocence of responsibility has affected the attitude of working-class people not only to economic affairs but to political tactics and a number of other things as well. Many people in the Labour Movement take it for granted that whatever that movement does, society will continue to be run and overall responsibility carried by someone else.'97

91. J. Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage ofBritish Socialism (London, 1987), 364. 92. 'The Future of the British Left', I961, Radio Hamburg, SP. Box 23. 93. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 387. 94. Proof copy of Gaitskell's Foreword for reprint of Durbin's The Politics of Democratic

Socialism, 9, GP, AI24. 95. Jenkins, A Life at the Center, 561. 96. BBC radio interview, 1973, CP, 13/36. 97. Magee, The New Radicalism, 124.





Responsibility meant winning elections and forming governments. Whilst Crossman acknowledged in June I96O that the genuinely socialist Labour Party he wished to see 'is likely to be out of office for much longer periods than the Tories',98 Crosland wrote in 1962 that Labour could 'present itself to the electorate in a mid-twentieth century guise' without 'in any way surrendering basic principles'." In part this simply reflected differences of socialist tactic, but revisionists were also translating individual qualities of character into the political sphere: to be in politics and not to seek to win was a betrayal, an indication of incompetence and emotional self-indulgence. Crosland referred to Max Weber's two ethics of 'ultimate ends' and 'responsibility', preferring adherents of the latter who 'hold themselves accountable for the consequences of their actions. Lacking the moral pride which enables them to say that one single end transcends all others and justifies a total sacrifice, they accept the limitations of political action.'100 To Jay, appearing doctrinaire or divided was a 'luxury', those who did not 'genuinely' seek to put their convictions into practice were 'traitors', and the 'duty' of an opposition party was 'to offer the public a practical alternative Government'.101

At the same time, revisionists sometimes found the intrigue and harshness of politics distasteful, and were reluctant to sacrifice certain qualities of mind and character to secure personal advancement. Hugh Dalton reflected after Durbin's death that he would 'have preferred an administrative to a purely political career'.102 Jenkins felt that to describe someone as a politician seems 'a rather disparaging remark',103 and wondered 'how much I was truly at ease with power'.104 Christopher Mayhew, who worked as PPS for Herbert Morrison, recalls his father in 1946 asking Morrison what he thought of his son's political prospects, to which Morrison replied: 'I am afraid Chris is too honest'.'01 Mayhew noted a recurring tension in his life: 'how does one reconcile the urge to pursue what is true, beautiful and/or holy with the urge to get on in the world?' His conclusion was that they could not be reconciled, 'that if we write poetry to make money, or perform good works to win esteem, or preach the Kingdom Of God with an eye to a bishopric, our poetry, our charitable work and our sermons will be flawed'.'o6 He claimed that 'no matter how public-spirited, politicians who hope to succeed must desire personal advancement. I felt inhibited about this: should not socialists, by definition, be disinterested?' 07 Revisionists' dissatisfaction with the

98. R. H. S. Crossman, Labour in the Affluent Society, Fabian Tract cccxxv (June 1960), 5. 99. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 116. ioo. Ibid., 143-4. ioi. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 375, 388-9. 102. H. Dalton, High Tide andAfter: Memoirs I945-i96o (London, 1962), 308. 103. Interview with the author: Roy Jenkins, I Dec. I999. Io4. Jenkins, A Life at the Center, 562. 105. Mayhew, Time to Explain, 6. io6. Ibid., 6. 107. Ibid., i8.





leadership of Wilson and Callaghan, and their sense that Gaitskell's death in 1963 was consequently a political tragedy related strongly to their sense that these people had different psychological motivations. Christopher Mayhew spoke for many revisionists in asserting that 'Gaitskell was a single-minded "doer" and Wilson a single-minded "be-er". Gaitskell was committed to social democracy and the Atlantic Alliance. Wilson ... was committed to taking up residence at No. Io and staying there as long as possible.'1"

Revisionist belief in the reforming potential of politics was in part a reflection of their confidence in the reforming potential of the state, a confidence that was not so great either before or after the revisionist era. The crossbench, formerly Conservative, peer Robert Skidelsky has asserted that in the twentieth century the duty of caring was transferred from the individual to the state, and the Director of Civitas, David Green contends that 'the growing welfare state this century [the twentieth] has in practice ... encouraged a view of morality which attributes moral worth to people who demand action by others'.'19 One does not need to embrace the political right's romanticisation of Victorian self-help to recognise that there is some validity in this. Socialism's over-reliance on the state in the period between the 1930s and the 1970s did mean that its methods, even if not so much its ultimate aims, tended to be economic and materialist more than moral and intellectual. This was an irony, because a central feature of revisionism was a rejection both of the dialectical materialism of Marxist analysis and the economic priorities of labourism. Crosland claimed in 1956 that 'the worst economic abuses and inefficiencies of modern society have been corrected; and this is no longer the sphere, in which reforms are most urgently required',"o and Jenkins contended in 1959 that more individual freedom and better culture would 'in the long run', 'be more important than even the most perfect of economic policies'."' Bryan Magee argued in 1962 that the assumption 'that the only problems you have to concern yourself with are the economic problems' had done 'immeasurable harm to the Labour Movement'.112

Yet most of the leading revisionists (Durbin, Jay, Gaitskell and Crosland) knew more about economics than anything else. Of the three leading works of revisionist thinking, The Socialist Case, The Politics of Democratic Socialism and The Future of Socialism, economics was dominant in the first and last, and important in the second. Jay in The Socialist Case had claimed that 'the case for socialism is mainly

Io8. Ibid., 178. 109. R. Skidelsky, Interests and Obsessions: Selected Essays (London, 1993), 9; D. Green, in a

seminar on 'The Privatisation of Morality', CUSP Review (Autumn 1997). IIo. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, II3. iii. Jenkins, The Labour Case, 146. 112. Magee, The New Radicalism, 93.





economic',113 and, in a passage that seemed to demand a choice between non-material and material improvement, argued that whilst 'non- "material" things' were 'of much greater value' than material ones, the answer was not 'to abandon the economic problem and attempt to improve the intellectual values of our fellow men'.114 In Crosland's analysis, non-material improvement was to some degree regarded as post-material, conditional on the prior attainment of economic goals, The Future ofSocialism citing Matthew Arnold: 'man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind'."'15 This chronology was also evident in Jay's belief that 'as standards rise, men and women almost invariably become less solely preoccupied with hunger and shelter, and begin to care about such philosophical dreams as free speech, education and even personal freedom'."' Crosland felt that 'every social objective I believe in depends on getting the economy right'."7 His non-material agenda thus faded when economic hard times returned in the 1970s. Even Durbin had insisted in 1940 that his synthesis of psychology and politics offered primarily long-term rewards: 'we have not the time nor the opportunity to do these things. It would take decades to affect the course of political relations by emotional education ... What therapy cannot cure, government must restrain.'"11 The younger generation of revisionists would also give priority to economics. John Mackintosh argued in 1972 that 'the crucial issues' were social security, tax, industrial relations and incomes policies.119

Socialism needed better people, but the state could not simply legislate to achieve this. Crosland was pessimistic about the political possibility of increasing the national sum of altruism: 'a change in social character, altering the underlying balance between self-regarding and other- regarding instincts, cannot, I suppose, be ruled out as a matter of theory. ... But of course we know too little about the determinants to say anything very useful when it comes to practical policy.'"20 Jay held a similar view in relation to snobbery: 'you can legislate against injustice and privilege', but snobbery 'is a disease of the spirit, and cannot be mainly fought with legislative weapons'.

21

In the 195os and I96os, revisionists' methods of 'improving' the citizenry were milder and more liberal than the eugenics advocated by Durbin. Provision of culture was one. Here, revisionists sought to strike

II3. Jay, Socialist Case, 352. 114. Ibid., 2-3. 15. See citation from Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1895 edn), 17, in Crosland, Future ofSocialism,

291-2. 116. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, Ioo-I. 117. Crosland, Tony Crosland, 187. 118. Durbin, The Politics ofDemocratic Socialism, 69-70. 119. J. Mackintosh, 'The Problems of the Labour Party', Political Quarterly, xliii (1972), 17-18. 120. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, Io9. 121. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 347.





a balance between their desire to promote greater access to high culture, and their reluctance to moralise. Gaitskell argued in 1956 that it was 'in the main best left to people themselves to decide' how to pursue happiness, but that the state should provide 'opportunities' given that people's 'capacity for making wise decisions in these matters is limited, if they have never been given the chance to appreciate a concert as well as a football match'.122 Crosland referred in 1962 to

the theory behind the post-war BBC Light, Home, and Third Programmes; it was hoped that over time, with increasing education and discrimination, listeners would graduate from the first through the second to the third. This was too simplistic and categorical an approach; and the programmes were not particularly suited to the end in view. But the principle is surely right.123

Labour's suspicion of the threat to culture that might develop in an increasingly affluent and materialist society, manifested in its hostility to Chancellor Harold Macmillan's introduction of premium bonds in his 1956 budget, was thus not exclusive to the left.

Increasing access to education, and the priority given to education policy was another approach common to many of the revisionists. The left had been uncertain in its attitude to education policy, partly because it gave greater priority to nationalisation, and also because it saw formal schooling as an inadequate education, reflecting as it did the assumptions of the existing economic system. Laski argued in 1935 that 'our educational systems seek to prepare the child for life; but the kind of life for which it is to be prepared is a function, once more, of the material relations of the productive system which obtains in a given society'.124 Bevan had disliked his own school experience, found difficulty in listening to discussions of formal education, and barely mentioned the issue in In Place of Fear (1952).125 The Future of Socialism, in contrast, had loudly proclaimed that education was 'of far greater significance to socialism than the nationalization of meat-procuring or even chemicals',126 and Jenkins called in 1953 for education to be given 'a leading place in the social-service queue'.127 In considering what the priorities should be between the different social services, Gaitskell wrote in 1956 that 'those

122. H. Gaitskell, Socialism and Nationalisation, Fabian tract ccc (uly 1956), 4. To Jay, in his Socialism in the New Society, 245, 'the proper responsibility of the State towards cultural advance in a free society is normally not to stop people doing things which are not thought valuable by Parliament or the Government, but to help them to enjoy things which are', and this meant that 'the State must be generous and imaginative in its whole approach to education in the widest sense .

123. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 208. See also Jenkins, The Labour Case, 135. 124. H. J. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (London, 1935), 109. 125. M. Foot, Aneurin Bevan: A Biography, i (London, 1962), 20. 126. Crosland, Future ofSocialism, 277. 127. Jenkins, Pursuit ofProgress, 182.





who are especially interested in creating a more equal society in the future are inclined especially to favour education'.128

In part, this reflected a revisionist belief in spreading the ability to reason. Crosland wrote in 1962 that 'the highest of all educational ideals' was 'fostering inquiry, dissent, and critical intellectuality',129 and Jay noted in the same year that, 'even though it be a platitude', education was 'the key not merely to economic advance, but to all the opportunities for human beings to live on the more civilized level which the higher economic standards of the present age, and fairer distribution of incomes, have made possible'.130 However, such references to the critical reasoning function of education were rare amongst the revisionists. As noted earlier, the idea of creating a learning culture was not one of their explicit objectives. Their interest in education was motivated at least as much, perhaps more, by the contribution that education could apparently make to reducing class divisions, and reversing relative economic decline. Jenkins argued that the eventual absorption of the public schools into the state sector would be 'a blow at a class society'.131 Magee saw the importance of educational reform in 'conducting a frontal assault on the British class structure'.132 Revisionists were, however, divided over the danger that educational democratisation, through the move to comprehensives, might pose to the value attached to intellectual excellence. Crosland, who as Secretary of State for Education issued the circular promoting comprehensive schools in 1965, was less anxious than Jenkins, who noted in 1953:

There are many who dislike levelling-down in any form. But it is far more justifiable in the case of material rewards, where it can be argued that great wealth is in itself socially undesirable, than in the case of education, where it certainly cannot be argued that the highest standards are not in themselves of great value.133

Hence, he argued in 1959 that there were 'some very good, well- established grammar schools' that should generally'be left undisturbed'.134 More broadly, there was a tension between the revisionists' involvement in politics and the value they placed on intelligent discussion. Starting work at the Daily Herald City office in 1937, Jay knew that 'what I cared for most was Labour Party propaganda rather than City scoops'.135

128. H. Gaitskell, Recent Developments in British Socialist Thinking (London, 1956), 34. See also Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 252; and Magee, The New Radicalism, 189.

129. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 176. 130. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 244-5. 131. Jenkins, Pursuit ofProgress, 182. 132. Magee, The New Radicalism, 189. 133. Jenkins, Pursuit ofProgress, 182.

134. Jenkins, The Labour Case, 98-9. I35. Jay, Change and Fortune, 65.




OF MIND AND CHARACTER, 1931-79 689 Labour Party propaganda may have been more desirable than City scoops, but as a Fellow of All Souls, Jay would also have been aware that it was not the same as critical analysis.

Revisionism was more about policy than personal example or logical persuasion, though these last two were not entirely absent. The lapsed nonconformist Crosland placed particular emphasis on practising what one preached,136 lamenting in 1961 that whilst the 'social and educational dominance of Oxford and Cambridge is now the most elitist single factor in our society', they 'exert an attraction which even New Left militants and ex-anti-Establishment-angries seem unable to resist; as from next Michaelmas, Mr Raymond Williams, Mr Alasdair MacIntyre, and Mr Kingsley Amis will all be taking up Oxford or Cambridge posts'.137 He called in 1962 for socialists to fight materialism and philis- tinism 'by example as well as precept'.138 Both Durbin and Gaitskell were known for seeking to improve the characters of their friends, and Gaitskell noted in 1953 that he, Durbin and others like them 'had great faith in the power of reason ... to persuade men to see the light'.139

Revisionism was a gradualist philosophy which, because it saw merits across the political divide, was unwilling to stray too much from the political centre. One of the most coherent articulations of this was Jay's 1962 passage on Athens (the left) and Sparta (the right):

Since organized societies first developed, and politics therefore began, men have tended to be divided into those who admired most either the values conjured up by the name of Athens or those by the name of Sparta. On the one hand: freedom, equality, social justice, humanity, intelligence, toleration and happiness. On the other: courage, endurance, self-sacrifice, 'piety', heroism, faith, loyalty ... Possibly the future for humanity will look a little less gloomy when those in either camp not merely recognize that the other genuinely admires its own strange ideal, but even that there is value in both. Athens and Sparta, by fighting one another nearly to the death, came near to destroying the civilizing energies of each.'40

The belief that qualities of mind traditionally associated with left and right both had value can be linked to Jay's recognition of a need for a synthesis of economic motivations: 'it is a crude over-simplification to believe that the "profit motive" and motive of "public service" are irrec- oncilable enemies which must destroy the other or not survive. An intelligently run society will seek to harness the impulse of public service

136. Telephone interview with the author: Susan Crosland, 14 April 200oo. 137. C. A. R. Crosland, 'Some Thoughts On English Education', Encounter, xvii (July I96I),

57. 138. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 27. 139. Proof copy of Gaitskell's Foreword (Dec. 1953) for reprint of Durbin's The Politics of

Democratic Socialism (i954), 9, GP, AI24. 140. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 33.





to the maximum, and also channel the motive of private gain into socially useful activity.'""41 The implication here was, nevertheless, that there was a hierarchy of values accompanying the synthesis, that public service and the pursuit of profit were both necessary, but that public service mattered more. Indeed, Jay proceeded to stress that 'there will be an immense need and demand for public spirit of the kind which Socialists have always rightly valued most'.142 For all their disagreements, revisionists and the left could unite around the view that service continued to matter more than profit.

By the 1970s some of the weaknesses of revisionist socialism, which, broadly, had been the dominant political approach since the 1940s, were beginning to manifest themselves in rising unemployment and inflation, and public disillusionment with both of the major parties, and revisionists themselves were at the forefront of exploring these weaknesses. Their prescriptions ranged from a need for greater political decentralisation to more commitment to Britain's role in Europe. But issues relating to qualities of mind and character were also raised, including in relation to economic policy. Though the left believed that revisionists had not done enough to combat the strength of capitalism, John Mackintosh, who in 1972 had seen 'signs that the reformist Right, like the Left, has run out of ideas',143 wrote in 1978 that 'the great weakness of Crosland's position was not that he underestimated the resilience of capitalism but that he over-estimated it. Throughout[,] his [1956] book, like Marxists, classical economists and Keynesians, assumes that the urge driving private people is so strong that they will perform in the economic field whatever the state does to them and whatever the social atmosphere'.'"1 It seems in retrospect that though revisionists ranked the mental quality of personal ambition or entrepreneurialism below that of duty or public service, they ought to have done more than they did to promote the former, and thus helped to avoid, as is the danger of socialism, a theoretical aspiration to the best becoming the enemy of the good. But it was not simply a problem of a lack of entrepreneurial motivation. There was also a lack of moderation and selflessness in some trade union demands, which once again called into question whether the labour movement itself possessed the qualities of character that would supposedly characterise a socialist society. Jay recalls that he became aware in the 1970s of the main weakness of his earlier The Socialist Case, that it failed 'to see that, given vigorous collective bargaining on pay, the effort to manage demand without managing labour costs (pay rates) could generate cost-push inflation'.145

141. Ibid., 340. 142. Ibid., 340-1. 143. Mackintosh, 'The Problems of the Labour Party', 5. 144. J. Mackintosh, 'Has Social Democracy Failed in Britain?', Political Quarterly, xlix (1978),

264. 145. Jay, Change and Fortune, 62-3.





Revisionism had failed to 'make' enough socialists or even social democrats. This was true in the sense of establishing Labour as the dominant party electorally, and even more true in the sense of making more people regard themselves as socialists. But most significantly, it was true in the sense of promoting the sort of qualities, such as caring, intelligence and ambition (for society as well as for individuals), that would have been required for a progressive society firmly to take root. Mackintosh pointed out in 1978 that 'Crosland did not fully appreciate that his programme was different in proposing to alter social attitudes by means of economic and institutional changes when it is by no means clear that the latter will bring about the former'."'46 His programme was 'too deep' in that 'it sought to alter aspects of British society which can and are changing but which may be too entrenched to be open to quick political solutions: governments, at least in democratic societies, must not attempt social engineering which is beyond their means, for to set impossible targets only leads to defeat and frustration'.'47 Yet equally, as we have seen, in many ways revisionism was not deep enough in the sense of paying sufficient attention to the underlying qualities of mind or character most likely to sustain it. It had sought to contest the right's claim to maximising economic 'sensitivity', by advocating state 'fine- tuning' of demand. Thatcher would soon mount a fightback on this terrain, recalling that she 'knew from my father's accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world'.'48 But revisionism also suffered from the limits to its own, and the nation's stock of moral and intellectual sensitivity, in the sense of a genuine concern for the complex needs of others. One can certainly not reduce some of the errors over the building of high-rise flats or the development of sink comprehensives to human insensitivity alone, but it was a factor. Marquand reflected in 1979 that whereas from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s 'Labour occupied the moral commanding heights', after that 'the version of welfare-state social democracy practised in this country since the War ran out of moral steam'. It had been too dominated by Keynesianism and Fabianism, 'both manipulative creeds, which held that society could be reformed only from above', and insufficiently influenced by New Liberalism, 'with its emphasis on moral persuasion and individual autonomy'.149 Social democrats 'seemed more anxious to do good to others than to help others to do good to themselves'.5o In a different sense, though, they had not done enough to promote the idea of doing good to others. Mayhew reflected self-critically that 'campaigning for anonymous

146. Mackintosh, 'Has Social Democracy Failed in Britain?', 266. 147. Ibid., 269. 148. M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1995), II. 149. Marquand, 'Inquest on a Movement', 9, II. 15o. Ibid., io.





groups of people - the Palestinians, the mentally sick - is no substitute for personal acts of charity'."'

Yet revisionists were not prepared to allow the people themselves to escape their share of the responsibility for the increasingly evident problems faced by social democracy. As Secretary of State for the Environment in August 1974, Crosland reflected that it was 'now clear: redistn. of RSG [Rate Support Grant] morally & socially absolutely right, but pol.[itically] definitely wrong. Good & Socialist policies not electorally popular.'152 He wrote in 1974, that increasing public discon- tentment was 'often (and naturally enough, given the fact of inflation) selfish and negative rather than radical and positive',153 and in December 1975, just over a year before his death, he noted that 'people make more and more incompatible (and often unreasonable) demands on government'.154 Comparing the 1970s with the 1940s, Mayhew perceived 'a society that was better-fed, better-clothed, better-housed and better- educated ... producing more crime, violence, loneliness, anxiety and depression'.'55 Douglas Jay acknowledged in 1980 that his generation 'did more to dismantle the religious dogmas than to replace them', and detected 'a widespread fall in intellectual and moral standards' since the 1930s. 'The permissive society can become a demoralized society':'56

Making all allowances for the natural human tendency to idealize the past, and for the uncertainty of the evidence, and having for a long time myself hoped to regard the change as a liberating and civilising process, I concede partial defeat when confronted in this country and elsewhere, with lower standards in education and the press, disrespect for the law, vandalism, drug-taking, crime, pornography, terrorism, and all the rest.'57

Revisionists began to hint, though no more, at an awareness, displayed decades earlier by Durbin, that future generations of reformers would have to pay more attention to the role of the family, which clearly played a major role in shaping individuals' characters and mental make-up. Jay had emphasised in 1962 that 'it would be much too complacent to suppose that the British Welfare State of 1945-51, even fully developed, would be the last word in social cure for socially curable human unhappiness'. This was partly because much distress sprang from non-economic causes, which included 'broken homes' and 'neglect of children'.'58 Crosland pointed in 1974 to research 'which suggests that we were

I5I. Mayhew, Time to Explain, 216. 152. Reflections, Aug. 1974, CP, i618, 12. 153. A. Crosland, Socialism Now and Other Essays (London, 1974), 54. 154. See A. Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe, Fabian tract cdxxxviii (Dec. 1975), 13-14. 55s. Mayhew, Time to Explain, I93. 156. Jay, Change and Fortune, 497-8. 157. Ibid., 497- 158. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 254-5.





inclined, 20o years ago, to exaggerate the effect of education, taken alone, on people's life chances, and so on'."15 He had been influenced by Jencks's Inequality, published in America in 1972, which stated that 'children seem to be far more influenced by what happens at home than by what happens in school'.160 But to be fair to the revisionists, they had been a generation in reaction against their parents, and their own insecurities and, in some cases, extra-marital affairs made them unlikely originators of a new stress on the importance of the family to socialism. This would come with New Labour.

The concern, shared with the right, that institutional egalitarianism could stifle intellectual excellence, already voiced by Jenkins, was further articulated in the 197Os. Comprehensives, though raising aspirations for many who would otherwise have been educated in secondary moderns, did not always preserve the high academic expectations of the grammar schools, a task made more difficult by the spread in some schools of mixed-ability teaching, which Crosland came in the 1970S to support.'61' Writing in 1978, Mackintosh posed the questions: 'Does equality mean that within one comprehensive school there should be no streaming according to ability or even no examinations? If so, does there come a point where the lack of any indicators of ability or effort militates against the working class child with no connections?'162 Marquand complained in 1979 that 'parents can be forced to send their children to schools of whose teaching methods they disapprove'.'63

The advantage for revisionists when their ideas began to seem outdated was that their very philosophy legitimised adaptation. Writing in 1978, Mackintosh suggested that if Crosland and Gaitskell had still been alive 'their intellectual honesty' would have ensured that 'they would have been the first to admit that their policies had not been fully successful' and would have attempted 'to rethink their case'.'64 But some critics felt that Crosland had become too wedded to a defence of his ideas of 1956, and that Labour as a whole lacked the intellectual qualities to change. Marquand argued in 1979 that 'a sensible party', faced with the challenge posed to its old assumptions, would have realised that 'intellectual vitality is the key to adaptability'.165 But new ideas, continued Marquand, 'require an open-minded and self-critical climate, in which there are no taboos against free enquiry and no sacred

I59. Interview with George Gale, April 1974, CP, 13/20, 327. I6o. C. Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America

(London, 1973), 255. 161. See his speech at the North of England Education Conference, 7 Jan. i966, CP, 5/2, 18o-1;

and, for evidence of his further movement towards favouring mixed-ability teaching, see his interview with George Gale, April 1974, CP, 13/20, 332.

162. Mackintosh, 'Has Social Democracy Failed in Britain?', 269. 163. Marquand, 'Inquest on a Movement', io. 164. Mackintosh, 'Has Social Democracy Failed in Britain?', 270o. 165. Marquand, 'Inquest on a Movement', II.

EHR, cxx. 487 (June 2005)oo



694 cows which cannot be slaughtered. In such a climate the two great myths of creed and class, the myths which hold the Labour Party together, would be dissolved.'166 This could mean that Labour had outlived its usefulness, for 'structure should be a function of purpose'.167 Revisionism was thus drawing on its ability to scrutinise, unpick and expose the flaws in traditional assumptions, including even in the much cherished goal of promoting equality of outcome. Magee noted as early as 1962 that a contemporary political outlook 'has to take full account of Einstein's revelation of the conjectural nature of all theories and all knowledge'.'16 Reflecting on his life in politics, Jenkins hoped he had 'done more good than harm, and on the whole believe this to be so. But I do not feel certainty about this, for my beliefs have become much less dogmatic and my outlook far more relativist than at the beginning."169

This was perhaps revisionism's most important contribution in the half-century from 1931. Operating from a position of passionate moderation, it rejected unqualified allegiance to any value, party or interest. Gaitskell had reflected in 1927: 'I think sentimentality is implied in any kind of strong belief whether it be religion, patriotism, socialism, or any thing like that'.170 Revisionists believed in synthesising and balancing desirable values and qualities of mind rather than choosing between them. And yet, this very belief in synthesis also suggested a need for a multitude of small, detailed, intelligent policies to be fused with some belief in 'big ideas', however qualified. For Durbin it was planning, for Crosland, equality, for Jenkins, liberty and the Common Market. And for all Jay's belief in the values of both Athens and Sparta, he recorded in I980 that his allegiance had 'inclined ever more strongly with the years towards the kindlier virtues', that is to say those of Athens/the left over Sparta/the right, 'though any rational man must respect both'.171 Thus, while revisionism shared New Labour's belief in synthesising diverse objectives, it was also more willing to proclaim an allegiance to big ideas. Finally, though, this article suggests that in confining its big ideas largely to concepts such as equality and freedom, or major policy objectives, revisionism was neglecting the big ideas of mind and character that were a central determinant of social democracy's success or failure.

Kingston University JEREMY NUTTALL

166. Ibid. 167. Ibid. 168. Magee, The New Radicalism, 12.

169. Jenkins, A Life at the Center, 561. 170. Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell, 15. 171. Jay, Change and Fortune, 5o5.




Labour Revisionism and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931-79

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