Beech and Hickson begin their study of Labour's Thinkers by arguing that “there has been relatively little academic attention directed to [the political thought of the Labour Party]” (1). While this was potentially true when the authors undertook their project, the recent publication of Jeremy Nuttall's Psychological Socialism and Ben Jackson's Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–1964 has shed new light on Labour's intellectual history. While Nuttall and Jackson offer thematic analyses of crucial strains in Labour's political thought, Beech and Hickson present twelve discreet studies of the thinkers whom they deem to have had the greatest impact on the intellectual development of social democracy post-1920. Their “all-time greatest team” (8) includes R. H. Tawney, Douglas Cole, Harold Laski, Evan Durbin, John Strachey, Dick Crossman, Tony Crosland, Stuart Holland, David Owen, Roy Hattersely, Anthony Giddens, and Gordon Brown. The list is as notable for its omissions as for its inclusions and reveals a significant degree about the authors’ conception of the historical development of the Labour movement.

Perhaps the most remarkable exclusions are Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Ramsay MacDonald. The centrality of these actors to the early history of the Labour Party notwithstanding, the Fabian emphasis on industrial organization and the progressive reformism expounded by MacDonald have both proved important influences on Labour thinking throughout the twentieth century. The authors claim that the Webbs and MacDonald's political theory lacked the sophistication of their successors (9). Yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are excluded because they do not fit the authors’ conception of the Labour party as a social democratic party. But while social democracy has supplied an important intellectual underpinning to Labour policy, particularly since 1931, the Labour party does not have the same historical genealogy as the continental socialist parties. Social democracy shares space with both “Labourism” and progressivism in the pantheon of influences on the party's ideological development, and within that pantheon the ideas of the Webbs and MacDonald loom large.

In addition to being biased toward socialist or social democratic thinkers, the work is also exclusively, and arguably unnecessarily, masculine. It is not clear that the intellectual contributions of Dick Crossman outweighed those of Barbara Castle or that David Owen's definition of social democracy had more influence on New Labour thinking than that of Shirley Williams. The other selections are more or less justifiable, depending on one's personal prejudices. While most historians would rate R. H. Tawney and Tony Crosland and while Harold Laski and Stuart Holland would probably get a nod from those interested in the genealogy of the left, it is unclear whether John Strachey or Roy Hattersley would make too many scholars’ political desert island discs. Evan Durbin's inclusion, as well as his central role in Nuttall's discussion of Labour ideology, suggests that the tragically drowned political scientist may be on the brink of a historical comeback. Much more so than any of Laski's writings, Durbin's The Politics of Democratic Socialism provides a cogent intellectual justification for the policies of the Attlee government and has the added benefit of allowing the authors to talk about 1945–51 without reference to either Herbert Morrison or Hugh Dalton, by whom one gets the impression they are probably not too impressed.

The authors claim that Labour's Thinkers offers a hermeneutic analysis of its subjects, by which they mean that the essays focus not on policy, or biography, but on the extraction of meaning and notably the meaning and implications of the various thinkers’ ideas for three key issues: the relevance of community to socialist ideology, the importance of equality and of equalitarian versus egalitarian outcomes, and the centrality of nationalization to the socialist project. These preoccupations and methodological strictures limit the utility of the essays as overviews of the individual subjects’ political thought, but they also frequently draw out overlooked and significant aspects of that thought. Hence, the essay on Evan Durbin emphasizes the centrality of the fascist threat in relegitimizing patriotism in the face of the internationalist and antipatriotic turn within the British Left after the First World War. The essay on Strachey goes far toward squaring the contradictions of his seemingly flag-in-the-wind political career, by highlighting his continued privileging of ends over means in the pursuit of high economic growth, high employment, and the reduction of inequality. And the essay on Crosland argues that previous scholars have underestimated his emphasis on the perils of meritocracy and the importance of equality of outcomes—a strain of his political philosophy that helps explain his support for comprehensive education. The final essays on New Labour similarly stress the importance of distinguishing between “equality of opportunity, greater equality of outcome (sometimes called ‘democratic equality’) and equality of outcome” (270). However, the weakness of the essays on Giddens (a proxy for Blair) and Brown is that they do not sufficiently illuminate the distinctions between the two strands of New Labour political thought. Arguably these distinctions are less substantial than the partisans of either Blair or Brown have contended, but if so, it seems hard to account for the presence of both essays. Finally, given that the authors open the book with a discussion of R. H. Tawney, it is odd that there is not a more serious attempt to come to terms with the role of community and ethical socialism in the New Labour project. While New Labour's attachment to these ideals might be less real than rhetorical, the importance of myth and rhetoric is often as, if not more, important than policy in forging a political identity, and it would be interesting to explore why, in a 1994 survey, Labour politicians rated Tawney second only to Robert Tressell and ahead of both the Bible and Marx in their list of most influential texts.