‘The new Messiah of my life’: Anthony Crosland's reading of Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy (1940)

Abstract

This article explores Anthony Crosland's rejection of Marxism in the early 1940s through his reading of Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy (1940). In correspondence with his friend Philip Williams, Crosland commented in unusual depth on Laurat's book. Using this correspondence alongside other contemporary writing, this article argues that Laurat's ideas helped Crosland untangle his own early thoughts on the relationship between Marxism and democratic socialism and establish the limitations of Marxist analysis for contemporary conditions. These themes contributed to an interpretation of modern capitalism that became central to Crosland's post-war writing and the emergence of ‘revisionist’ socialism in Britain. Furthermore, the Left Book Club's translation of Laurat's book and continued parallels between Crosland's and Laurat's analyses in the 1950s open the possibility of greater connections between continental European and ‘revisionist’ British socialism.