The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Seldom has a historical text, or the historian who wrote it, been as influential on subsequent work. Yet The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson’s work as a historian, and the Marxist tradition to which he belonged have also been subject to more than a generation of probing criticism—political, historiographical, and theoretical. Mark Bevir’s excellent new book, The Making of British Socialism, manifests both respect for and critique of Thompson’s achievement. The very title of Bevir’s book, like so many others since the 1960s, pays homage to Thompson’s masterpiece. Bevir’s aspiration to understand late nineteenth-century British socialists in their own terms echoes Thompson’s aspiration to rescue early industrial workers “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Yet in crucial respects, Bevir breaks with his predecessor. In Bevir’s view, despite Thompson’s critique of orthodox Marxism, his work (along with that of Eric Hobsbawm and other historians of his generation) was founded on a narrative of history that implicitly assumed working-class triumph and socialism’s inevitability. This teleological narrative is not only no longer tenable, but it also distorts the history of socialism, as its assumption produces a selective and distorted reading of the left’s historical past. Writing in a world politically and intellectually dominated by neoliberalism and rampant individualism—yet possibly politically in flux as a consequence of the global financial collapse—Bevir revisits the history of British socialism shorn of the assumptions implicit in the “old historiography.” His hope is to recover strands that might yet prove capable of reviving the British socialist movement in the present.

Theoretically, Bevir likewise distances himself from Thompson. While Thompson famously declared “the poverty of theory,” Bevir regards this position as a naive form of empiricism that wrongly equates theory with determinism. However, where similar critiques of Thompson have been made in the past, they often have been coupled with advocacy of some version of postmodernism or the linguistic turn. Bevir distances himself from these positions as well. He argues that they are founded on a reified concept of language that leads historians to look for a common set of meanings, thus making it difficult to account for change and the diversity of opinions. In short, Bevir does not reject agency and experience, but he wants to reframe them. The two key terms that Bevir uses to explore “situated agents” are “tradition” and “dilemma.” The former constitutes the context in which agents find themselves and think about their situation; the latter connotes the challenges that they face and helps explain the continuities and innovations that ensue. To my mind, this is an eloquent way of viewing how human agency operates in history. But it is closer to Thompson than Bevir implies. For Thompson, the working class experienced the “dilemmas” produced by the industrial revolution through the “tradition” of the freeborn Englishman.

The Making of British Socialism was written over an extended period of time. Most of its chapters seem to be revisions of already-published work. It sometimes reads like a series of essays rather than a cohesive narrative, but this does not ultimately detract from the book’s overall argument. For Bevir, the formative years of British socialism, by which he means the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminated in the Labour Party, but that party did not capture the diversity of trends and ideas expressed during these decisive years. More specifically, Labour’s statist policies ignored traditions of democratic self-rule, “the radical extension of democratic principles throughout civil society” (315). Bevir views the various strands of British socialism as efforts to overcome the Victorian intellectual and religious crisis, by which he means the collapse of classical economics and evangelicalism. Seen from this perspective, the book is more of a social history of ideas than social history per se. Bevir is primarily concerned with how socialist ideas, expressed primarily by intellectuals, achieved institutional forms.

Accordingly, the book is divided into three parts, each stressing a strand of ideas that helped shape the evolving socialist movement(s). In the first two sections, those on Marxism and Fabianism, Bevir produces significant and sometimes refreshing reassessments. His carefully researched accounts of British Marxist pioneers, E. B. Bax and H. M. Hyndman, result in more compelling versions of those figures than previously presented. In my view, Bevir’s efforts at puncturing the idealized view of William Morris held by left-wing British intellectuals are less persuasive because the “purism” that Bevir seems to object to in Morris is, in fact, an important part of his appeal. Bevir’s portrayal of the diversity of opinion among the Fabians is among the highlights of the book. He persuasively argues that Fabianism cohered around themes drawn from liberal radicalism, particularly reformist humanitarianism, and developed in the context of the collapse of classical economics. The third part of the book, the most sprawling of the three, concerns the rise of “ethical socialism.” It includes everything from the Labour church movement to communal anarchism. Bevir suggests that ethical socialism developed out of the Victorian crisis of faith. It provided “a new home for old religious emotion” (220), blending personal transformation and communalism. Among the many fine chapters that constitute this section, Bevir’s treatment of British socialists’ creative reworking of American transcendentalism stands out as major contribution to transatlantic intellectual history.

Overall, Mark Bevir’s The Making of British Socialism is a major achievement, making fresh and vital well-traveled historical territory through a blend of prodigious research, carefully constructed arguments, and a thorough knowledge of the existing historiography. Whether it will contribute to the revival of socialist thought in Britain is an open question. In the conclusion, Bevir argues for a revival of socialist utopian thought, which would “seek to educate aspiration” (315). Here he echoes Edward Thompson, who more than fifty years ago found in the utopian thought of William Morris an alternative to the impoverished thinking of the Communist and Labour parties. The ghost of Thompson still lurks.