Fabian Society Research Articles

Water Supply and the Hygiene of the Poorest in G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion

ABSTRACT In Pygmalion, Shaw describes Eliza as extremely dirty. This article examines Shaw’s views on hygiene for the poorest in Pygmalion, those who were increasingly marginalized in modernizing London in the early 1910s. First, the article examines improvements in London in the first decades of the 1900s. Then, it explores the water schemes of two organizations: the London County Council in the 1890s and the Metropolitan Water Board in the 1900s up to the 1910s. The LCC’s schemes were deeply entangled with the Fabian Society, of which Shaw was a lifelong member. Examining the LCC’s proposals for water municipalization, this article argues that Shaw imbued Pygmalion with social criticism. With his descriptions of the short supply of water in Eliza’s lodgings, which resulted in her unhygienic body and clothing, Shaw ironically dramatized the problematic boundaries of class and gender identity in a social order commonly regarded as natural and even genuine.

Katharine Conway’s Ethics of Intimacy

ABSTRACT This essay explores debates among Fabian socialists over the meaning of ‘free love’ taking as its starting point a conflict that arose between Katharine St John Conway and William De Mattos in 1892. Conway’s encounter with De Mattos, it argues, contributed to the development of her understanding of love and its place in Fabian politics. The narratives that Conway wrote in the aftermath of this conflict, including the narrative of her own marriage, attempt to define a feminist ethics of intimacy that manifest socialist principles. The essay claims that Conway expands ideas about love to encompass new ways of thinking about the relationship between individual freedom and communal obligations.

The policy of permeation of Fabian Society into the National Health Service policy of Labour Party in the early 20th century

In pursuit of social reform, Fabian Society, a British Socialist Group, adopted the a policy of permeation of other parties. Under the influence of osmosis, Fabian Society, represented by Mr and Mrs Webb, exerted influence over Labour’s policy on the National Health Service, and in the continuous run-in to the national health service in part of the Labour policy and views with Fabian Society gradually convergence. By drawing on the positive experience of Fabian, combining the establishment of a jointly managed health system, the consolidation of redundant health services, the improvement of the administrative efficiency of government-related services, the development of voluntary hospitals and sanatoriums with the inherent commitment of the Labour Party to free health care for all, and the establishment of a public health sector at the national level, thus for the UK in the field of public health to establish a national medical social system to provide an excellent blueprint. Labour’s policies in the field of national health have profoundly changed the face of British society.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

‘Rents in the Veil of Time’: Annie Besant’s Auto-biographies of Giordano Bruno

Annie Besant published several autobiographical texts from 1878, starting with the preface to My Path to Atheism, when she was vice-president of the National Secular Society. Her first autobiography, Autobiographical Sketches, appeared in book form in 1885, the year she joined the Fabian Society, a decision she justified in 1886 with Why I Am a Socialist. When Besant converted to Theosophy in 1889, she wrote Why I Became a Theosophist, and her revised autobiography, Annie Besant: An Autobiography, was published in 1893, preceded by 1875 to 1891: A Fragment of Autobiography. Meanwhile, Besant penned her first biography of the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1876, a short sketch published in The National Reformer, the NSS weekly. She wrote a more detailed Story of Giordano Bruno, in 1884-5, at the time she joined the Socialist revival. Her fascination with Bruno took a new dimension from 1889, when she embraced the Theosophists’ belief in reincarnation: she had come to the conclusion that she had been Bruno in a past life when she lectured on Giordano Bruno: the Man and the Teacher in 1898, and delivered Le Message de Giordano Bruno au Monde moderne, in the Sorbonne in 1911. No study of Besant’s writings on Bruno has ever been published. So, this paper explores the reasons why Annie Besant wrote four biographies of Giordano Bruno between 1876 and 1911. It retraces her personal and spiritual evolution through an analysis of her biographies of Bruno as occult autobiographies, that transgress gender boundaries, and pursue the legitimization strategies developed by Besant in her openly autobiographical texts.

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Preparing for progressive change from opposition

Preparing for progressive change from opposition

The Abstraction of Sovereignty: The Ottoman Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Socialist Thought

Abstract This article examines the way British socialists came to provide intellectual and political weight to the ‘internationalizing’ of non-European territory during and after the First World War. While there is now a substantial body of scholarship articulating the continuities between Victorian liberal imperialism and the liberal internationalism of the early twentieth century that gave rise, most notably, to the League of Nations’ mandates system, parallel developments within socialist thought in Britain have been less readily noted. Critically, leading Fabian Society intellectuals reaffirmed the late nineteenth-century belief that European powers had the legal as well as moral right to partition and internationalize territories and markets in the name of preserving peace and advancing prosperity. Indeed, in the drive to produce conceptually robust positions on problems of world order, in certain respects socialists went furthest in scope and ambition. An aspect of this dynamic is explored here by paying particular attention to the place of the Ottoman Empire in socialist discussions of international government and the mandates system.

DEVELOPING THE LABOUR PARTY’S COMPREHENSIVE SECONDARY EDUCATION POLICY, 1950-1965: PARTY ACTIVISTS AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND POLICY ENTREPRENEURS

ABSTRACT The main aim of this article is to use the case study of comprehensivisation to examine the role of party activists as policy entrepreneurs and public intellectuals during the period 1950–1965. The intention is to widen the traditional notion of the public intellectual in order to better evaluate policy-making processes within the Labour Party. It will be argued here that these figures were also policy entrepreneurs, who actively created and advocated new policy solutions, not just unconnected idea merchants hawking impractical or ignorable ideas without a clear strategy. Previously, Labour policy on comprehensivisation was viewed as a ‘missed opportunity’, a case study of ambivalent policymakers lacking vision. However, this article demonstrates that, over a long period of time, a methodical policymaking process considered and adopted a position that advocated a more comprehensive schooling system. In this process, the sustained activities of Fabian Society and NALT members, acting as policy entrepreneurs within the Labour Party’s policymaking organs to transform often non-committal and vague conference resolutions into a usable policy solution.

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

A Fabian paradise or a one‐man show? How the interwar Queensland economy seduced two prominent English economists

AbstractThis article tells how the two British economists Hugh Dalton and Colin Clark, came to regard Queensland in the 1930s as an enviable model of economic development. Both men were Fabian socialists and impressed by Queensland's authoritarian premier and by its array of economic controls. Clark even surrendered a promising career at Cambridge to become an economic advisor there. In turn, Queensland, and a personal spiritual crisis, would propel Clark to discard Fabianism for Distributivism. In the final analysis Queensland's agrarian socialism was not drawn upon Fabian lines but rather impelled by a mix of rural development and electoral pragmatism.

«ДЕТИ ЖЕЛЕЗНОЙ ДОРОГИ»: ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЕ ВОПЛОЩЕНИЕ ФАБИАНЦЕВ В ПОЭТИКЕ ЭДИТ НЕСБИТ

The literary expression of the socio-political views of the English writer Edith Nesbit (1958-1926) in the children’s adventure novel “The Railway Children “ (1906) is studied. Nesbit was an active member of the social democratic Fabian society, and her political activities could not but be reflected in her work. Being, on the one hand, the author of children’s literature, and on the other hand, representing the “new woman”, the writer used the images of children to realize the idea of a possible break with traditional gender and social roles. At the same time, the author notes the compromise position of the author in relation to the women’s issue. The artistic implication is analyzed: the poetics of the name, costume and space.

Alfred Marshall's Last Challenge: His Book on Economic Progress

Alfred Marshall's Last Challenge: His Book on Economic Progress

Anand Teltumbde on Globalization and Ambedkar: A Left Perspective

The left leaning or the Marxian school deals with the social, economic and political ideology or a movement, which aims at establishing a communist stateless society. According to the left-leaning thinkers, the proletarian rule will exist for some point of time, after which the state will wither away. In this case, understanding Ambedkar from a left perspective would be a new paradigm. Anand Teltumbde on one side says that Ambedkar was not a Marxist and that he was under the intellectual influence of his teachers, who were known as the Fabian socialists, and on the other side says that he practiced the class politics.

A liberal voice and a Fabian: Alfred Cobban

This article discusses Alfred Cobban’s liberal beliefs. It also reveals for the first time that he was a Fabian socialist. Cobban was Professor of French History at University College, London, from 1953 to his death in 1968. Cobban was outstanding both for his scholarship, his numerous publications on modern French history and his supervision of an impressive number of doctoral students, particularly women, who went on both to publish and to become professors in universities in Britain and in Canada. Cobban’s outstanding books on Rousseau, on the Enlightenment, in particular on the French Revolution, and also well-known studies of contemporary politics, display his liberalism, his belief in individual freedom, democracy and change through gradual reform. Cobban joined the Fabian socialists when he was an undergraduate. Fabians were hostile to change through revolution, had no time for Marxism and argued that a socialist society would emerge through parliamentary reform. Such views correspond to Cobban’s ideas on 1789, in which he was in profound disagreement with leading French revolutionary historians such as Professor Ernest Labrousse. French liberal historians including Professor François Furet and Professor Leroy-Ladurie shared Cobban’s views that 1789 was primarily a political revolution.

An Introduction to Bernard Shaw's “To Your Tents, Oh Israel!”

ABSTRACT “To Your Tents, Oh Israel!” may be Shaw's key work of political journalism written during his time as a full-time journalist. Shaw drafted the essay, signed “The Fabian Society” when published in the Fortnightly Review (November 1893), with input from Sidney Webb and the approval of the Fabian Society executive and publishing committees. As Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: “The excitement of the autumn has been the issue of the Fabian manifesto … Shaw's manufacturing out of Sidney's facts.”1 As an attack on Gladstone's Liberal Party for its failure after nearly two years in government to fulfill the promises of the 1891 Newcastle Program, the manifesto, dripping with sarcasm (unusual enough in Shaw's polemics) and heightened irony, succeeded in its aim of effecting a cleavage between the Fabian Society and the Liberal Party, after seven years spent assiduously permeating it.

에디스 네스빗의 사미어드 삼부작에 나타난 유토피아 사회

This study intends to investigate Edith Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy as including her social activities as a member of the Fabian Society as well as lessons for children. Psammead trilogy comprises Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The story of the Amulet (1906); the fantasy of these novels dreams of a better world brought by magical change while criticizing life in British society. The three volumes feature middle-class children crossing socio-economic boundaries with the magic of Psammead, a phoenix, a carpet, and an amulet and traveling through history and culture. Nesbit uses magical adventure to criticize her contemporary society, which is based on socio-economic inequality. She then suggests a future utopian society that would eliminate the ugliness of poverty and rise above the standard of high beauty. However, this city is a virtual society that only exists in the future: as a realistic alternative, she concludes the story with the revival of the family unit-an ideal upheld by the middle class, from which the Fabian Society originated.

ACCOUNTING FOR GROWTH IN HISTORY

AbstractThe contributions to this Special Issue present the state of the art of growth accounting in economic history, exhibiting its strengths and weaknesses. Three set of articles compose the issue: comparative papers that discuss the challenges ahead, long‐run perspectives on Britain since the Industrial Revolution, Japan, Italy and Spain from the late‐19th century, and Latin America during the 200 years since independence, and post‐World War II episodes under Soviet and Fabian socialism and the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and India. The papers reveal how sensitive the interpretation of results is to the quality of output and inputs and the growth accounting procedure employed and the need to adopt the new developments in growth accounting to improve economic history narrative.