The World of Fabianism
Our Partnership.
by Beatrice Webb.
New York-London-Toronto, Longmans Green, 1948. 491 pp. $6.00.

Beatrice Webb died in 1943 without having completed the record of her historic partnership with her husband. The present volume, a sequel to an earlier account of her formative years, has been edited with considerable skill from her manuscript, which carries the reader from her marriage in 1892 almost down to the eve of the First World War, but although largely based on her diaries the story has a somewhat impersonal flavor. Perhaps this is what Beatrice would have wished. Like Sidney—the “Other One,” to use the surprising pet name she invented for him—she preferred blue-books to novels. Apart from detailed character analyses of relatives like the Crippses, through whom the original Fabian mantle has now descended on the British Treasury, and friends like the Bertrand Russells, there is scarcely a personal note in the whole book.

The Webbs began by ignoring Marx and ended by taking him literally—at a time, too, when many Marxists of long standing had become less doctrinaire. At the beginning of their long and fruitful partnership in social investigation they thought Marx outmoded. In 1938, Beatrice—in a brief chapter appended to the present volume—not only made amends (“where we went hopelessly wrong was in ignoring Karl Marx’ forecast of the eventual breakdown of the capitalist system”), but even credited him with opinions actually uttered by Lenin many years later, and indicated that she shared the Communist expectation of a sensational capitalist collapse. Like Sidney (who became Baron Passfield in 1929 but lost interest in the British Labor party after the failure of the second MacDonald Government in 1931), she developed a romantic attachment to the “new civilization” of Soviet Communism, to which they devoted a comprehensive if uncritical study published in 1935. Beatrice’s autobiography helps to explain the ease with which this transfer of loyalties was accomplished.

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The little world of Fabianism, of which Sidney Webb had become a member a few years before his marriage to Beatrice Potter in 1892, differed from Continental socialism in two important respects: it was exclusively middleclass, and it had no use for “Marxian” Social-Democracy, i.e. for the employment of the labor movement as a means of establishing political freedom. This, in Britain, was the business of the Liberal party, with whose leaders the Webbs worked in the closest partnership. Fabianism was there to advise the more advanced Liberals, to wean the more conservative trade unionists away from their blind allegiance to the Tory party, to advocate limited reforms in the field of municipal government, education, health insurance, etc., and to prevent socialists from straying into politics of a pseudo-revolutionary kind. For a long time even the term “socialism” was carefully avoided. The Webbs described their doctrine as “collectivism,” and Beatrice’s diary forms a record of their sustained effort to “permeate” both the Conservative and the Liberal parties with the conviction that the new age called for a break with laissez-faire individualism.

To an amazingly large extent they were successful; they even obtained the financial support of the Rothschilds and of various South African millionaires for their greatest single achievement: the foundation of the London School of Economics. Nor was there any reason why Balfour, Haldane, Grey, Asquith, Rosebery, and the rest of them should have regarded the Fabians in general, and the Webbs in particular, with aversion: they were for the most part staunch supporters of the South African War against the Boers (Beatrice’s chief worry was that the military defeats made Britain look silly), and their indefatigable work in sifting evidence before royal commissions, drafting memoranda, sitting on committees, and advising cabinet ministers on social insurance schemes, was a heaven-sent aid to overworked, ignorant, or lazy party chiefs. Their zeal for research never flagged: the same period saw the publication of their voluminous studies in the history of trade unionism, the development of British local government since 1688, and similar dull subjects that no one else had had the energy to study. It is not surprising that in the end half the political work came to rest on them.

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But there was more to it than hard work (Beatrice bitterly despised the ruling oligarchy for its mental laziness, and never forgave Asquith for marrying “a silly wife” who took him to country-houses and taught him to ride on horseback) and intellectual competence: the Fabians believed in the rule of the expert, and especially of the trained sociologist. In this respect they were truly prophetic of the future. They had grasped that government was becoming a complicated affair demanding expert knowledge and constant attention to detail. In a country governed by aristocratic idlers like Balfour and busy lawyers like Asquith, this gave them more influence than the size of their political following warranted, for the Labor party only became a factor in the years immediately preceding the First World War, and it was only in 1918 that it dared to adopt a socialist program (drafted by the Webbs). During the entire period covered by this volume, Sidney and Beatrice had to work through the Liberal oligarchy, and occasionally the Conservatives. The diary is replete with detailed accounts of dinner parties uniting the elite of political London. Very few of the guests were labor leaders, and the few proved disappointing to the Webbs. Indeed, throughout the book the organized workers remain shadowy figures, although there is a good account of trade union congresses, with their inevitable intrigues. Some of the outstanding labor leaders of the period—Tom Mann, John Burns, Keir Hardie—make a fleeting appearance, but it is clear that none of them liked or trusted the Webbs, and that the latter thought them hopelessly incompetent. Their personal rivalries irritated Beatrice, and the gaseous rhetoric of British and Continental socialists outraged her hard-headed common sense.

The Webbs stood for “collectivism,” but for the greater part of their career their only allies were Liberal politicians and officials. The mass of the workers were “sottish,” and their leaders thought only of their own careers. The book therefore is chiefly the record of the Webbs’ research work and of their unending efforts at “permeation.” Caught between the parliamentary oligarchy, which they despised, and the labor movement, which they thought immature, they were thrown back on their unwavering faith in the final triumph of knowledge—eventually to be realized in the Soviet Union, where Beatrice was also able to satisfy her life-long craving for a hierarchical organization replacing the Church. (She was very proud of her discovery that the Communist party was organized like a religious order.)

As a partnership, it was a brilliant success. “The union of two commonplace minds,” as Beatrice once defined it, produced standard works in a field as yet untrod, gave London a new university, turned the Fabian Society into a powerful instrument of propaganda for socialism, and ultimately made the Labor party possible.

It was also a happy union of two human beings who were singularly devoted to each other. If there was a domineering streak in Beatrice, there was a passive quality in Sidney which responded to her un-self-conscious assumption of authority. For Beatrice emerges from this record as the stronger character, though intellectually she was content to play second fiddle. Her confidence in their joint mission never wavered. One thought worried her: what would become of religion in a world in which doctrinal Christianity was losing its hold? People, she thought, needed some form of organized religious attachment. It was the only organization for which she and Sidney never succeeded in providing a draft.

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