Our elders do have some wisdom

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

East Coker (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets)

Readers will know that Four Quartets is a favourite of mine – although I don’t pretend to understand past the first line of this excerpt. The sections I prefer are those dealing with the difficulties we have in making sense to others and the ambiguities of the words we use.

My business card carries the word “explorer” - partly because of the dozen countries I have known in the past 35 years; and partly because of the delight I have taken in getting to know writers over my lifetime. Now that I approach the winter of my years, I’ve been trying to put down what I’ve learned from the 50 years of trying to get bureaucratic systems to operate more in the interests of the average citizen. I’ve already told the tale of listening spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State” (1971). In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change. From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……In those days there was little talk of management (!) - only a few Peter Drucker books although Kenneth Boulding had published as far back asa 1953 The Organisational Revolution a study in the ethics of economic organisation. But it was 1969 before Gerald Caiden gave us Administrative Reform - reflecting the change that was in the air in the 1960s. The early 1960s had seen, first in 1961, the election of JF Kennedy then of Lyndon Johnson who started the “War on Poverty” – then in 1964 of Harold Wilson who had initiated a series of Royal Commissions to identify the weaknesses of a range of British institutions (including the civil service and local government).

1968 saw not only the student rebellions but the start of my own political career (first in a Scottish municipality where, from 1971, I chaired an innovative Social Work system - then in the largest European Regional local authority which, from 1975, established a unique community-based social strategy). That lasted until 1990 when the pending dismantling of the Regions encouraged me to accept the invitation from the Head of Public Health in the Copenhagen branch of WHO to work for her on a temporary basis (lasting 6 months) allowing me take up a new career as a consultant in ex-communist countries. All this is described in the current draft of The Search for Democracy – a long journey which is a sort of memoir of the reform lessons from the 40-odd years between 1970 and 2012 when I eventually hung up my boots.

Others doing some stock-taking were Rod Rhodes and Chris Pollitt whose video presentation on the lessons from the British reform efforts of the past 40 years is well worth watching

Sadly, Pollitt is no longer with us – but the other writers in the band I very much respect are. And this includes names such as Bourgon, Caiden, Fukuyama, Guy Peters, Hood, Jessop, Jun, Rhodes, Raadscheldres, Rose and Rothstein. Of these, only Raadschelders has graced us with a memoir (of a sort) which is The Three Ages of Government – from the person to the group to the world (2020) who is, sadly, far too academic – every sentence has a reference which you have to consult at the end. But it does give a very good sense of the literature.

Classic Texts

Administrative Reform Gerald Caiden 1969

The Dynamics of Public Administration Gerald Caiden 1971

Comparative European Politics – the story of a profession - https://www.gbv.de/dms/sub-hamburg/222052791.pdf ed Hans Daalder 1997

The social construction of Public Admin Jong Jun 2006

Public Administration in Transition – essays in honour of Gerald Caiden 2007

Questioning reform https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/come-back-state-all-is-forgiven.html

jocelyne bourgon’s presentation of A new synthesis of PA - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3A669FX-bU&t=718s&ab_channel=LSE

PROSPECT FOR NEGOTIATIONS

Last night I watched Oslo – the film about the secret (“backchannel”) Israel-PLO negotiations which took place in the early 1990s while an official process was underway in Madrid and which are described in this background note.

For 76 years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been hemmed in and the violent Hamas incursion last weekend has caused a brutal Israeli retaliation – bringing forward accusations of war crimes from a few people but cheered on by most Western politicians. This protest from a UK Conservative politician is a rare voice of sanity

As far back as 1988 Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said edited this book Blaming the Victims – spurious scholarship and the Palestine Question. Thirty years later we get Gaza – an inquest into its martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein (2018)

There seems little chance of anyone being willing to go back to the negotiating table but the question does need to be raised - What it would take to get people back to that table?

I’ve been going back to some posts I’ve done on the issue of RECONCILIATION in which Adam Kahane was very much my guide. Two of his books can be read here

Solving Tough Problems – an open way of talking, listening and creating new realities Adam Kahane (2006) and

Power and Love – a theory and practice of social change (2010)

For less US-oriented stuff I would recommend -

Negotiating in Times of Conflict ed G Sher and G Kurz 2015

Small State Mediation in International Conflicts – diplomacy and negotiation in Israel-Palestine; J Erikkson (2015)

The classic is, however, Getting to Yes – negotiating agreement without giving in by R Fisher and W Ury (1981)

UPDATE; I’ve been horrified by the pathetic British response to the violence of the last week – with no empathy shown to the suffering and simply siding with a state which has brutally suppressed Palestinian aspirations. I was therefore heartened by this post which closely analysed the speech of a Labour politician which wasn’t able to condemn the Israelis for their war crimes – and grateful that at least one Conservative politician was able to cross that line. And even more grateful that my positive comments on the post received a lot of positive feedback from Brits who clearly find the MSM coverage distasteful  

On Thinking for oneself

One of the faults of which I am constantly guilty is assuming that my reading will bring new insights. So I was delighted to read this morning the latest post from the marvellous Cultural Tutor

Arthur Schopenhauer is not the sort of person I usually write about in the Areopagus. 

He was a philosopher, after all, and I maintain that philosophers must be treated 

with caution! But, recently, somebody suggested that I read a few of his shorter 

essays. One of them, simply titled “On Thinking For Oneself”, caught my attention. 

Thinking and writing are in many ways synonymous: the better we think, the better 

we write, and vice versa.
So, how does one think for oneself? The thrust of Schopenhauer's advice is that 

we shouldn't rely too much on reading: “Reading is a mere makeshift for original 

thinking”.
That is not to say we shouldn't read, of course. Schopenhauer's point is that we 

mustn't confuse reading (which can be very useful) with thinking:

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for oneself 

and that produced by reading is incredibly great... reading forces on the mind ideas 

that are as foreign and heterogeneous to the tendency and mood it has at the moment, 

as is the seal to the wax whereon it impresses its stamp.

....the mind is deprived of all its elasticity by much reading as is a spring when a weight 

is continually applied to it; and the surest way not to have thoughts of our own is for 

us at once to take up a book when we have a moment to spare. This practice is the 

reason why erudition makes most men more stupid and simple than they are by 

nature and also deprives their literary careers of every success. As Pope says, they 

remain, "For ever reading, never to be read."

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers... are those who have read 

directly in the book of the world. Schopenhauer uses a rather neat analogy for 

the difference between reading and thinking:

Those who have spent their lives in reading, and have drawn their wisdom from books,

 resemble men who have acquired precise information about a country from many descriptions 

of travel. They are able to give much information about things, but at bottom they 

have really no coherent, clear, and thorough knowledge of the nature of the country. 

On the other hand, those who have spent their lives in thinking are like men who 

have themselves been in that country. They alone really know what they are talking 

about; they have a consistent and coherent knowledge of things there and are truly 

at home in them.

I’m not sure if I totally agree with the thrust of his argument. Our own opinions,

 after all, are generally a reflection of the prevailing social consensus or, as 

JK Galbraith famously called it, the “conventional wisdom”  Christian Lupsa is a 

Romanian journalist who was for the past decade the editor of an interesting 

journal DoR  and now writes a weekly blog (in English) which this week challenges 

the ease with which we sink into these bubbles  

Schopenhauer goes on to argue that we must begin with our own opinions rather than 

those of other people:

Thus the man who thinks for himself only subsequently becomes acquainted with the 

authorities for his opinions when they serve merely to confirm him therein and to 

encourage him. The book-philosopher, on the other hand, starts from those authorities 

in that he constructs for himself an entire system from the opinions of others which 

he has collected in the course of his reading. Such a system is then like an automaton 

composed of foreign material, whereas that of the original thinker resembles a living 

human being.

It isn't easy to find our own opinions, of course, but Schopenhauer argues that 

effort in doing so is entirely worthwhile. These days, of course, we are besieged 

by books offering to help us to think more critically  

Even if occasionally we had been able very easily and conveniently to find in a book a 

truth or view which we very laboriously and slowly discovered through our own thinking 

and combining, it is nevertheless a hundred times more valuable if we have arrived at 

it through our own original thinking. Only then does it enter into the whole system 

of our ideas as an integral part and living member; only then is it completely and firmly 

connected therewith, is understood in all its grounds and consequents, bears the 

colour, tone, and stamp of our whole mode of thought, has come at the very time 

when the need for it was keen, is therefore firmly established and cannot again 

pass away

I shall leave it there for now. Schopenhauer, though he has been accused of many 

things, is rarely accused of not being an original thinker. In an age when the internet 

makes it all too easy to pass our time consuming the words (and, therefore, the thoughts 

and opinions) of others, he offers a timely reminder to step back and put in the work 

ourselves. As always, I recommend reading the essay in full. 

LAWLESS IN GAZA

Eyeless in Gaza is a famous 1936 book written by Aldous Huxley about intellectuals in English society. The title is just a modernist trick since none of the characters are blind and Gaza is not even mentioned. But the middle-east journalist Jonathan Cook has cleverly referenced the title in his latest post which suggests that Israel is using Gaza to market its surveillance and security technology

Five countries can boast of having murdered most people. Obviously Germany 

and Japan are on the list – but many people will be surprised to find the US, 

UK and  Israel there also.

What I want to do today is to see how well writers have risen to the challenge of dealing with such violence

Everyone is familiar with the German case – British television is constantly 

screening second world war films but people have forgotten the 1986 debate 

in Germany about its Sonderweg – or exceptionalism – when its historians 

eventually forced its citizens to come to terms with the enormity of the Nazi 

deeds. But Fritz Stern’s had shown the roots of fascism much earlier in his 1961 

book The Politics of Cultural Despair – a study in the rise of Germanic ideology 

But those who prefer their history to be narrated in more personal terms
are advised to go to Gita Sereny’s amazing conversations with and study of 

Hitler’s architect Albert Speer – his battle with Truth (1995)

Japan is more difficult for a Brit to deal with – I have to rest on Ian Buruma’s 

The Wages of Guilt – memories of war in Germany and Japan (1994) 

For the United States Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is the go-to book for the violence inflicted on ordinary people in their struggles for recognition and dignity in that country. And Noam Chomsky has recorded the millions of deaths the country has perpetrated both directly and indirectly on the peoples of the middle east, central Asia and Latin America.

The violence of the British Empire is summarily dealt with in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics – liberals, race and empire (2020)

My view of the violence in the middle east has been coloured by the superb journalism of Robert Fisk whose The Great War for Civilisation (2005) reflects his long experience in the middle east and sets in context Ten Myths about Israel (2017) by the famous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe. And for those who prefer images I recommend the 2002 Pilger documentary on Palestine

But for raw and open dialogue I would guide readers to this powerful interview 

with Yuval Harari
 

The Importance of Context

The outbreak of Israel-Hamas violence last weekend is one of these moments which compels a response – but not a knee-jerk one. A more contextual one is called for such as offered by an Australian journalist (who happens to be Jewish) whose Twitter analysis has just gone viral. Richard Loewenstein has written several books the most relevant of which is My Israel Question  But the most objective book is probably Enemies and Neighbours – jews and arabs 1917-2017 by Ian Black (2017)

What is striking is the number of prominent Israelis who are supportive of the defenceless Palestinians who have operated for several years in what even the United Nations calls an “open prison”. And it’s not just Yuval Harari who protests against the Israel government - I’m just reading Ten Myths about Israel (2017) by the famous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, who is part of a group of local historians hostile to the Zionism which has increased the grip it has on the country in the past half-century. Indeed Pappe co-authored in 2015 On Palestine with no less a figure than Noem Chomsky. Avi Shlaim is another historian critical of Israel

It was good to see the US journal Boston Review put the violence properly in context with a piece which has just appeared

Hamas differs from the other major Palestinian party, Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas and based in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. (Gaza was formally occupied then as well; it was not until 2005 that Israel withdrew soldiers and Jewish settlements.) Though initially committed to armed resistance, Fatah was eventually prepared to recognize Israel and negotiate with it in hopes of establishing a Palestinian state—the so-called two-state solution, which was pursued, though unsuccessfully, during the Oslo negotiations of the 1990s. Hamas and Fatah have had a contentious relationship, which has at times turned violent.

It bears noting, however, that the UN partition is regarded as an injustice even by Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas. The signal event that followed from the partition and that has been seared into Palestinians’ memory is the forced expulsion or flight of 700,000 of their forbears from the territory the UN assigned to Israel, the killing of another 15,000, and the destruction of at least 400 villages—what Palestinians call the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). Many of those displaced in these years ended up in Gaza.

Increased Israeli settlements

There has been a dramatic increase in settlement since the 2022 election. According to the Israeli NGO Peace Now, the government “promoted 12,855 housing units” in the West Bank in the first six months of 2023 alone, almost twice as many as it did in the preceding two years combined. In addition, the demolition or seizure of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, and attacks by settlers on Palestinians, continues. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that 752 “Palestinian-owned structures” in the West Bank have been destroyed between January and October of this year, displacing 1,182 people, whereas the corresponding figures for all of 2022 were 954 and 1,032. Violence by West Bank settlers against Palestinians has likewise increased sharply since 2021.

In short, Hamas and the ultra-religious parties that are now part of Israel’s government are defined by irreconcilable historical, religious, and political narratives. These beliefs are hardly new, nor are they sole source of the enmity between Israel and Hamas, or the only explanation for the October 7 attack. Still, it cannot be understood fully without taking them into account. Furthermore, the diminished stature of Fatah in the West Bank, Hamas’s dominance in Gaza, and the powerful role of ultranationalist parties in Israeli politics have together increased the probability of violent confrontations between the IDF and the Al-Qassem Brigades.

As for the future

the plight of Gza’s more than 2 million people will doubtless polarize the Middle East to an extent not seen in many years, especially if the war continues for weeks or months. The calling up of 300,000 IDF reservists and the massing of 100,000 in southern Israel, confirmed by Israel’s chief military spokesman, suggest that Netanyahu’s government has, at the very least, not ruled out that option.

The model of two states living by side—Palestinian having full control over the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as the capital—was roughly the goal of the 1990s Oslo negotiations, but it has become much more complicated to accomplish because of what has occurred in the West Bank. Since 1967, 279 Jewish settlements have been established there, and they are now home to 700,000 Israeli Jews. For a territorially continuous and substantial Palestinian state to emerge the settlements would have to dismantled, and Israel would have to yield East Jerusalem. No Israeli government would want to embark on that politically explosive mission, and so long as religious parties play a role in governing, it won’t be entertained even as an idea. More fundamentally, just as Hamas denies the legitimacy of Israel and rejects a two-state solution, ultra-religious Israeli parties reject the very notion of a Palestinian state, no matter its configuration. Furthermore, the scale and surprise of Hamas’s attack could well embolden and strengthen Israelis who warn that any kind of Palestinian state would pose a mortal threat to their country.

We are, then, left with the dismal and dangerous future featuring intermittent cycles of violence between Israel and Hamas. As always no one will suffer more than civilians—Israelis, but particularly Palestinians living in Gaza. And while this particular confrontation may pass without other states joining the fray, we cannot count on that happening forever.

Still, we have witnessed momentous and unexpected changes in the last twenty-five years—including the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and before that the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Changes within Israel and in the world that make for a more hopeful turn of events cannot be ruled out, especially as voices for dialogue and reconciliation exist within Israel and among Palestinians. That, at least, must be our hope.

Other useful links

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/impending-genocide

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/10/16/gazas-last-stand-the-dangers-of-a-second-nakba/

https://www.declassifieduk.org/lawless-in-gaza-why-britain-and-the-west-back-israels-crimes/

https://indi.ca/the-west-is-showing-its-whole-genocidal-ass/

good analysis of the background to the conflict 

https://indi.ca/why-should-i-hate-hamas/

https://www.conter.scot/2023/10/11/defend-gaza-oppose-green-lighting-war-crimes/

https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/we-are-being-fed-misinformation-to?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/11/craig-murray-condemnation/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/get-out-of-there-now

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii96/articles/perry-anderson-the-house-of-zion.pdf2015

Rethinking the politics of Israel-Palestine Bruno Kreisky Forum 2014

https://issuu.com/oxfordpoliticalreview/docs/opr_issue_9_pr_ml_issuu/s/23567523

THE GREAT ACCELERATION

A superb treat for my readers today...Peter Russell is, for my money, one of the most interesting writers about CHANGE – one of my favourite topics for the past few decades. As far back as 1992 he published a fascinating and extremely accessible book called Waking up in Time whose text (marvellously) was broken up with pictures and paragraph headings to allow the reader to get an immediate sense of the argument. Too many books fail this simple test and have pages full of unrelieved text.

Russell has a great website which offers us an opportunity to experiment with ChatGP and I used it to ask the simple question “Why didn’t the book make a greater impact?” to which the algorithm responded

Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time" was indeed a profound exploration of the interplay between consciousness, evolution, and the potential for human beings to change their perspectives on time and space. However, it's not uncommon for such thought-provoking books to not receive the widespread recognition they may deserve. There could be multiple reasons why this book hasn't made a more significant impact:
- Timing: The book was published in 1992, a time when the collective consciousness and mainstream media were perhaps not as open to new-age thinking and topics as they are today.
- Mainstream Acceptance: The concepts in the book push the boundaries of conventional thought, delving into spirituality, consciousness, and the nature of reality – subjects that have traditionally been on the fringe of mainstream acceptance.
- Competition for Attention: There is a vast volume of self-help and personal development literature available. Unfortunately, even deserving books can get lost in the crowd.

That said, the impact of a book is not just measured by its popularity or sales figures, but also by the profound transformation it can bring about in individual readers. Peter Russell's work continues to be discovered and appreciated by many who are seeking to explore these concepts. It's important to remember that sometimes, seeds are sown quietly, but they still have the potential to sprout into something beautiful over time.

To which one can say only - Wow!! 

Russell has, this year, updated the 1992 book with Forgiving Humanity – how the most innovative species became the most dangerous (2023) which he used AI to interview himself about (surely a first?!). Both books emphasise the importance of exponential change 

I have added these books to my short note on CHANGE along with some other recent books which fall more into the category of social change to which I may try to do justice in some future posts

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal – theories of political organisation by Rodriguez Nunes 2021 who is interviewed here

Augmented Humanity – being and remaining agentic in a digitised world by Peter Bryant 2021

World Protests – study of key protest issues in the 21^st Century I Oriz et al 2022

If we Burn – the mass protest decade and the missing revolution by Vincent Bevins 2023 interviewed by Chris Hedges here

End Times – elites, counterelites and the path of political disintegration by Peter Turchin 2023 with Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani

SHOWCASING THE YOUNGER HISTORIANS

The UK discourages new entrants onto the political market and prefers to see the two main political parties slugging it out. Although there have been calls recently for a change to an electoral system which better reflects citizen preferences, expecting change is equivalent to encouraging Turkeys to vote for an earlier Christmas.

This has been a series on books about the Labour party and I’m pleased to report that one of the most recent Rethinking Labour’s Past edited by Matt Yeowell (2022) is very readable, indeed journalistic (in the best sense). Nothing annoys me more than the style of academic writing which ends each sentence with a bracket and several names, which – if you want to follow up, require you to interrupt your reading and go what is usually a long bibliography at the end of the book.

But this book is different – not only is it beautifully written but each page is extensively footnoted, giving you all the references you need

In the last two great turning points in British political history, in the late 1970s and in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Labour – and progressives more widely – were unable to prevent their political opponents from framing events in ways that contributed to major rightward shifts in British politics

Unlike earlier books in this series, this book showcases younger historians such as Ben Jackson whose chapter

investigates how Labour leaders have interpreted the party’s past, comparing the rhetoric used by the three postwar, election-winning Labour prime ministers – Attlee, Wilson and Blair – in order to identify what was distinctive about Blair’s understanding of Labour history. However, the aim of this comparison is not to castigate Blair as a regrettable anomaly but rather to understand why the more traditional historical self-understanding of the Labour Party lost its allure in the late twentieth century. The chapter will conclude by considering, as the party looks to the future, how we might …..seek to reinject into Labour’s account of the past the idealism that the architects of New Labour so scrupulously removed. Weber acknowledged that ‘disenchantment’ risked leaving the modern world adrift from meaning or purpose in the absence of agreed ethical and spiritual values. The task for the Labour Party today is to reconnect with the inspiring aspects of its past without sliding back into the self-congratulatory and uncritical historical ambience that was dispelled by the political ruptures of the late twentieth century.

Another chapter I enjoyed was the one on “social democracy and community”

We can crudely identify four stages in Labour’s twentieth-century history in which a community-oriented critique of social democracy came to the fore.

• Firstly, the immediate period following the high watermark of 1945, through to the late 1950s: as the party struggled to come to terms with ‘affluence’ and the apparent disappearance of a wartime spirit of community and social solidarity, the decay of working-class community became a prominent concern for writers and thinkers, such as Richard Hoggart and Michael Young. The apparent erosion of localized working-class cultures by the ‘massification’ of culture, rise of new towns and suburbs, and physical decline or dismantling of ‘traditional working-class neighbourhoods’ featured prominently in such accounts.

• Secondly, by the late 1960s, ‘community’ was increasingly invoked by activists practising grassroots politics within Britain’s ‘crisis’-hit inner cities. Labour politicians saw the rise of community action in this period both as a challenge to the party’s political primacy and to the central priorities of social democracy, yet also as an opportunity to align the party to new concerns and new constituencies.

• Thirdly, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist social democrats (including key founding figures of the SDP) and ‘new urban left’ councils would both try to channel these energies, drawing on related critiques of Labourism and its reliance on centralized state power.

• Finally, the 1990s would see the communitarian critique of social democracy take centre stage within the party, as New Labour sought to centre the concept of ‘community’ within its politics, and to distance itself from many of the perceived shortcomings of past Labour governments and the cultural politics of the left. However, this engagement would wane in government. By the 2010s, Blue Labour was levelling a similar critique at the Blair–Brown governments.

Many on the Left were beginning to question whether Labour could successfully reconnect with people’s everyday lives’. Sociologists – like Young himself – and cultural critics such as Hoggart and Raymond Williams showed an increasing interest in popular culture and in the everyday lives of working-class people. The emergence of the First New Left after 1956 saw a deeper engagement with culture and an emphasis on nonstate forms of socialism from the Marxist left. Meanwhile, a debate played out amongst social democrats about the apparent ‘embourgeoisement’ of parts of Labour’s electoral base

The Labour Party’s Trajectory

If there is one book I would recommend to people trying to understand the British Labour party, it is Interpreting the Labour Party (2003) which explores the hidden assumptions of the leading interpreters of the party – authors such as Anderson, Coates, Giddens, Marquand, Miliband, Minkin, Morgan, Nairn, Pantich and Pelling,

The opening chapter of the book Understanding Labour’s ideological trajectory probably offers the best overview of the struggle for the party’s soul which has characterised the party in the post-war period.

The party suffered in the 1970s when a mixture of inflation and public debt caused it to seek damaging assistance from the IMF – and even Mitterands’s France was forced to a shameful reversal of economic strategy. The irony is that it is the Conservative party which generally makes a mess of the economy with the role of the Labour party often being to recue the country from the damage austerity has inflicted on the country. Political Economy and the Labour Party by Noel Thompson (2003) throws a very helpful light on the different strands and phases which the party has been through in the past century – at least until 2003.

1 Marxism, state socialism and anarcho-communism

2 Fabian political economy

3 Guild socialism

4 Liberal socialism and the challenge to Fabianism

5 R. H. Tawney and the political economy of ethical socialism

1970–2005

14 Rethinking socialism: left-wing revisionism in the 1970s

15 Liberal socialism revised: the 1970s

16 The alternative economic strategy and after, 1972–86

17 Liberal socialism rejuvenated: the 1980s

18 Supply-side socialism: the 1990s

19 From stakeholderism to the Third Way

The Moral Economists by Tim Rogan (2017) is a rare book which does justice to a neglected aspect in analyses of the party – namely the moral considerations. I became an act -ive member of the Labour party when I was 16 or so – in 1958. Indeed I became, at University, in the early 1960s chairman of the local Young Socialist branch which led me to being invited to a session at Hugh Gaitskell’s house, then the leader of the Labour party and hung on his words at my home when he gave a couple of hostile speeches to Labour party conferences about the Common Market and unilateral disarmament. It was the moral arguments which persuaded me at the time – expressed, for example, in Tony Crosland’s “The Conservative Enemy” (1962) which, unfortunately, I can’t download and readers will have to do with a New Left riposte. “The Moral Economists” was nicely reviewed by the LRB. . 

From 1903 to 1906, Tawney lived at Toynbee Hall, where well-meaning graduates undertook 

social work in the East End of London. But, as he quickly realised, he had no aptitude for doling out ‘soup and blankets’ to the ‘demoralised’ poor of Whitechapel. Charity wasn’t a solution to the crisis of capitalism. Tawney looked instead to the newly formed Workers’ Educational Association. He moved to Manchester in 1909 and worked as a tutor in Rochdale and other places in the North-West, becoming the WEA’s president from 1929 to 1945. The WEA was distinctive in its highly decentralised organisation, supported by trade unions, the co-operative movement and the Labour Party. Tawney supported its paternalistic aim of neutralising class conflict, a mission resented by Marxist critics. Many of its students, however, found the experience politically energising. Tawney’s admiration for the working-class solidarity he found in these Northern industrial towns was so great that during the First World War he joined up as a private in a Pals battalion, returning to Manchester after being wounded at the Somme. His reflections in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism on the discrepancy between the medieval social order and atomised modernity were informed by his experience of the differences between Lancashire and London.
In 1948, Thompson moved to Halifax with his wife, Dorothy, to work as a tutor in history and English for the extramural department at the University of Leeds. The subject and approach of “The Making of the English Working Class” reflect the time he spent there. 
Its opening chapter on the London Corresponding Society of the 1790s described a radical working-class coterie of the sort Thompson admired. But the majority of the book is about the wool croppers and artisan craftsmen of the towns and villages of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the culture, idioms and, most important, the solidarity of his students, Thompson detected the legacy of their ancestors, those who became class conscious as a result of the Industrial and French Revolutions.
Polanyi also taught for the WEA in London and for the Oxford extramural department in 
the 1930s, but according to Rogan, Polanyi’s Damascene conversion occurred when he fled Hungary for Austria following the failed revolution of 1919. He arrived in ‘Red Vienna’, where a new autonomous municipal government run by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was pioneering reforms in health and education. Polanyi saw this as a truly democratic form of socialism. Living with his new wife in a rundown area and teaching economics, he began to believe that ‘an alternative to Wilsonian and Leninist principles of social order was conceivable’. 
Postwar Austria was flooded with British relief workers, interested in the latest trends in social thought. Because of them, Polanyi read and admired Tawney and other British critics of capitalism. The admiration became mutual. Tawney wrote an article for the New Statesman in November 1935 in which he cited Polanyi as a thinker who linked Christianity and popular communism through ‘an idea of human personality’.

The three books offered different chronologies of the rise of capitalism.

In Tawney’s version, the process took place in the period 1540-1640. The Protestant 

Reformation displaced a medieval society in which ‘economics is still a branch of ethics

 … the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic 

transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian church.’ The dissolution of the monasteries created a market for land and employment. It was every man for himself (and this was a male world; family ties were also increasingly separated from economic life). The individualising ethos of Calvinism and Puritanism secularised economics, resulting in ‘the new science of Political Arithmetic’, which ignored or eroded the social bonds that had been upheld by religious and moral obligations.

Polanyi and Thompson located the origins of free-market economics much later
, during the Enlightenment.
In Polanyi’s view, laissez-faire peaked in England with the introduction in 1834 of the New Poor Law, a punitive welfare system influenced by utilitarian ideas of efficiency and Malthus’s theories of population control. 
In Thompson’s account, English society had originally been governed predominantly by a 
‘moral economy’ based on age-old ideas of a just price and a fair wage, enacted through 
negotiation, customary regulations and tradition. During the French wars, however, economic elites became increasingly enamoured of the laissez-faire political philosophy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Landowners enclosed common land, and employers took on unskilled labour and introduced machinery, transforming skilled workers into ‘hands’, subject to the whims of the free market. This process was intensified by government withdrawal from regulation of the new industrial economy, including the repeal of the Elizabethan legislation which controlled the number of apprentices and set piece rates for cloth. During the Napoleonic Wars, Thompson complained, ‘almost the entire paternalist code was swept away.’

One book remains to which I will try to do justice in the next post

A superb 4 hour video about Labour - the wilderness years can be viewed here