The books by Mark Bevir and Gregory Claeys are very different in a number of ways, and yet reading them together can prove a fruitful exercise. Besides the obvious differences in thinkers and movements focused on, the main other difference is that the chapters that compose The Making of British Socialism were published earlier as articles, whereas Imperial Sceptics is a new monograph focusing on criticisms of imperialism and the British Empire by a wide range of thinkers and activists on the left of the political spectrum. Although the main overlap between the two books is the focus on a number of socialist thinkers (exclusively in Bevir's, partly in Claeyes's) what can most fruitfully be learned from a joint perusal refers not so much to socialism as to another –ism: the omni-present and pervasive impact of Comtean positivism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British political and social thought and activism.
According to Mark Bevir, the British socialist movement emerged as people from diverse traditions grappled with a) the crisis of faith and b) the collapse of political economy. First a few “Tory radicals” (Henry Mayers Hyndman most notable among them) and republicans joined forces with “popular radicals” and Continental European exiles, forming Marxist organizations (most prominently, the Social Democratic Federation). Shortly afterwards, as classical political economy lost its convincingness and appeal, Bevir argues, “liberal radicals” started adopting neoclassical, marginal, and positivist economic theories, and some of them used these theories to defend socialist ideas. At the same time, given that liberal radicals were “generally Christians and often evangelicals,” the crisis of faith led many of them to adopt “an evolutionary and ethical positivism that inspired a widespread enthusiasm for humanitarian reform and sometimes for socialism” (Making of British Socialism, p. 131).
The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with “The Marxists,” with chapters on Ernest Belfort Bax, Hyndman, and William Morris, as well as on the Social Democratic Federation. Bevir is convincing in his argument that Hyndman's Marxist (and other socialist) critics misunderstand his politics, because they ignore “his debt to Tory radicalism” (p. 80). The chapter on Morris, “everyone's favorite British socialist,” suggests that it does not really matter whether or not Morris was a Marxist, given that, for Bevir, “[i]deologies are not mutually exclusive, reified entities,” but rather “overlapping traditions with ill-defined boundaries.” Thus, “to conclude Morris was a Marxist would not rule out his also being either an ethical socialist or an anarchist” (p. 86). Bevir highlights Morris's debt to broader traditions such as romanticism and Protestantism.
The second part of the book deals with the Fabians. A chapter is dedicated to debunking the myth that the Fabians were united by a common theory of rent. Chapters on George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb are followed by a chapter on debates as to the best strategy to follow (“Permeation and Independent Labor”). According to Bevir, the Fabians were liberal radicals who confronted the Victorian crisis of faith and the collapse of classical economics. Over time, “Fabian socialism came to draw most heavily on ethical positivism as a response to the crisis of faith and on evolutionary sociology as a response to the collapse of classical economics.” This meant that the leading Fabians “believed that people had a social duty to promote the common good and to uplift the poor through the gradual and continuous development of collective institutions.” By the 1890s, the leading Fabians “defined socialism in terms of positivist sociology.” Thus, the distinctive feature of Fabian socialism had become “a focus on institutional and administrative relationships rather than economic ones” (p. 214).
The third part deals with “The Ethical Socialists.” There are chapters on “Welfarism, Socialism, and Religion,” on American Romanticism and British Socialism, on “Ethical Anarchism,” and on the Labour Church Movement. Here, Bevir traces what he calls “a broad cultural shift from the age of atonement to the age of immanentism.” He concedes that the crisis of faith obviously led some people to secularism. Yet, he argues that “by far and away the most common response to the crisis of faith was a change of religious faith from evangelicalism and atonement theology to the immanentism found in, for example, incarnational theology, pantheistic idealism, and new forms of belief such as theosophy.” The age of immanentism gave rise to new socialist and welfarist beliefs, which “broke with the older individualism, emphasized community, and ultimately sanctioned state action and social welfare” (pp. 232–33).
Bevir makes much of the rejection of “utilitarianism” by a number of the socialists he discusses as part of the process that made them into socialists. However, this reviewer had the sense that, according to some—highly respected—interpretations of J. S. Mill, some of the features Bevir describes as constitutive of the reaction against utilitarianism were present in—and in fact central to—the younger Mill's thought and outlook. To be fair to him, Bevir does refer to Mill at one point as “a bridge,” but he still does not sufficiently appreciate the degree to which this was the case.
This leads me to another problem. Bevir makes much in the introductory chapter of his rejection of “reified” definitions of “socialism” and states that his aim is “to recover the meanings of socialism for people who thought of themselves as socialists” (p. 14). But then, where is Robert Owen? And why are people such as Mill (who called himself a socialist) not included in this book on the making of British socialism? It might have been more acurate for Bevir to have said that the book focuses on the most crucial “moment” in the formation of British socialism, the decades of the 1880s and 1890s, when the concentration of interest in socialism was for the first time so dense and intense. But it would have been better to talk (as Claeys does in the other book under review) of the revival of British socialism in the 1880s, rather than of its “making” in the 1880s and 1890s, given how much socialist thought had been produced and published earlier in the nineteenth century.
Bevir's classification of the different categories of British positivists is slightly problematic (for instance, it is not true that Frederic Harrison rejected Auguste Comte's “Religion of Humanity” (p. 57)—what is more accurate would have been to say that he was not keen on the ridiculously detailed liturgical ceremonials stipulated by Comte), and the account of Bax's relationship with positivism is not fully satisfactory.
No such complaint can be raised with regard to Imperial Sceptics. Claeys's chapter on the Comtists is the book's greatest (though by no means only) contribution, given how neglected their anti-imperialism had been in extant literature. Although an excellent overall introduction to the history of British positivism was contributed by T. R. Wright, the Comtists' writings and activism on the empire had been almost ignored. Claeys rectifies this with a vengeance. Imperial Sceptics is an ambitious book on a very important and demanding topic. It is based on an astonishingly large pool of primary sources gleaned from a great mumber of archives, besides a daunting amount of published material. At the same time, it displays a meticulous knowledge and confident command of the enormous—and ever-increasing—secondary literature. The book is composed of three substantial, long chapters (rather equivalent to “parts” in most books) plus an introductory and a concluding chapter.
The first of the long chapters deals with great sensitivity and in unprecedentd depth and detail with the pioneering and remarkable contributions to anti-imperialist thinking produced by the British Comtists, followers of Comte's positivist philosophy and his “Church of Humanity.” The second chapter examines with similar historical sensitivity and analytical sharpness, the diverse attitudes toward empire amomg the various strands of British socialists. The third chapter places J. A. Hobson's celebrated utterances on imperialism in their historical context, by showing that much of what he is credited with had been anticipated by some of the thinkers discussed in the previous two chapters, and by demonstrating the similarities of his pronouncements with those of some socialist thinkers.
Given the status of Hobson in the literature on theories of imperialism, even this contextualization in itself would have been a major contribution to scholarship. But the book does much more in showing the diversity of responses to empire and imperialism among a great number of socialists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and in highlighting the neglected importance of the Comtists. It is not just that Comte's British followers were the first to come up with the economic explanations of imperialism usually associated with Hobson. It is also that the Comtists came up with an astonishingly vociferous, sustained, and sometimes influential campaign against empires of conquest, starting as early as the mid-1850s and continuing until the 1920s.
Claeys very correctly emphasizes the importance of the positivist Religion of Humanity and its crucial role in determining their anti-imperialist stance. It was the fact that the Positivists believed in the unity of the human race and considered all peoples of the world “our brothers and fellow-citizens of the world—children of the same great kith and kin” (as Harrison put it in National and Social Problems, 1908) that led them to attack empires of conquest as vociferously as they did. It was, at the same time, the ridiculous aspects of the rituals imposed on that religion by its founder that led to their being derided by many contemporaries and later underestimated by condescending historians. But while their “religion” and “church of humanity” never managed to convert a large number of Britons, their political message regarding imperialism was much better received among parts of the intellectual elites of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and Claeys's remarkably well-researched study traces their influence on a great number of thinkers.
Given how strikingly the influence of Comte's positivism on numerous socialists emerges from Bevir's book as well, the combined effect of the two books is to highlight the major significance of positivism for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British thought. When one thinks of the impact of Comte's positivism on American Gilded Age thinkers, and of the evidence from all sorts of different countries to the same effect, a major desideratum of historical research seems to be to attempt to combine the experiences of many different Comtist movements and the diffusion of Comte's ideas all over the world.
