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BOOK REVIEW
| Jeremy Nuttall, Psychological Socialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006. pp. ix + 213. £60.00 cloth.
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| Psychological Socialism explores a dimension of British Labourism that is evidently worthy of study: the extent to which aspirations for moral, psychological, cultural and intellectual development drove the movement, alongside the more widely understood desire for redistributive reform. It contains a mass of interesting and useful detail, tracing the intellectual lineage and exploring the complexities of belief of a range of prominent figures in the British Labour Party between 1931 and today. |
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It is flawed, however, by one startling omission, and by a political agenda that many will find questionable and which may blind readers who disagree with it to the book's many virtues. The omission in question concerns the attitudes of the working class to the ideas of those who sought its improvement. The book is detailed and nuanced in its investigation of figures such as Crosland, Bevan and Blair, of Gaitskell, Hoggart and Williams, but regarding the autodidacts and teetotallers in the mechanics' institutes and co-ops, trade union branches and amongst the ranks of the Left Book Club there is silence; this is very much a history from above. Related to this is the political agenda of the book, a desire to rehabilitate the reputation of the 'moderate' wing of the Labour Party, in particular the leadership of the party who saw off the challenge of Bevan and his supporters in the 1950s. It is revealing that perhaps the closest thing to a discussion of the attitudes of the working class itself to these questions is a general statement in the conclusion that, far from being betrayed in any sense by the behaviour of its representatives the British people between 1964 and 1970 got the 'got the governments they "deserved"'. |
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At one end of the historical survey there is an exercise in revisionist rehabilitation of Ramsay MacDonald:
Whatever his limitations, MacDonald had helped Labour acquire a reputation for being moderate and competent, characteristics which facilitated its emergence as the second strongest party. In 1931, few in the Labour Party had an alternative economic policy to MacDonald's belief in balancing the budget (p. 36).
At the other end the book contains a sustained apologia for New Labour and what its author considers to be the historic achievements of the Blair government. He concludes that:
the egalitarian society, the achievement of 'the big idea', if it is to happen at all, looks, from a present-day eye, more likely to evolve, at snail pace, from changing ideas, improved education and increased parental love than to be levered suddenly into place by action at the Treasury, the colliery or even multiple public nurseries (p. 180).
Needless to say this is not a political agenda that many Labour historians are likely to be comfortable with. To the extent that the book is devoted to such revision and apologia it does a disservice to the author's considerable and scholarly research. More importantly it leaves unexplored a number of intriguing questions. How, for instance, does the belief of earlier generations of moderate Labour politicians in the perfectibility of human beings – in the possibility of human improvement – compare to the beliefs and aspirations of their contemporary equivalents? The crisis of confidence in 'socialism', particularly in its Stalinist and social democratic variants, since the fall of 'Communism' in Eastern Europe has had an effect also on the right-wing of social democracy. It is precisely around these questions that such an investigation would be likely to bear fruit. |
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The book also contains not a single mention of eugenics, an extremely important intellectual current within the Left (particularly that section influenced by Fabianism) until the Holocaust discredited it. How important was it to the mindset of the political figures prominent in the 1930s that this study focuses on? After 1945 it was taboo, but did it cast a shadow after that? |
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In short this is a book which will annoy many, which is a shame as it is based on an impressive, indeed prodigious and scholarly body of research. It is to be hoped that it will still serve as a useful springboard for further research. |
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| Victoria University |
ROBERT BOLLARD | |
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