America and the New British Radicalism

• DOI: 10.1177/106591295300600101
• Date: 01 March 1953
• Published date: 01 March 1953
• Author: Gordon K. Lewis
• Subject Matter: Articles

The Western
political Quarterly
VOL. VI
MARCH, 1953
No. 1
AMERICA AND THE NEW BRITISH RADICALISM
GORDON K. LEWIS
Harward University
T
IS WELL OVER A GENERATION since Lowell wrote his essay
about the English, On a Certain Condescension Toward Foreigners.
The revolutions worked by war and economic crisis have done much
to temper that attitude in the English of unconscious superiority. Its
presupposition, that for the Englishman it was enough to be rather than
to do, has been rudely upset by the realization that Britain must now
struggle fiercely for recognition in a world no longer prepared to accept
the ample platitudes of Mr. Podsnap. It is evident from the history of
the Schumann Plan and of the European Defence Community that White-
hall no longer controls the balance of European power; not even Mr.
Churchill can now afford to behave like Lord Palmerston. The Marshall
Plan has been received with a gratitude unmistakably genuine. But it
would be misleading not to emphasize the fact that it has evoked an anti-
American spirit only explicable as the expression of a half-conscious sense
of shame that a people traditionally proud of its independence now
discovers itself, both in the economic and the strategic fields, increasingly
dependent upon American aid and increasingly influenced by American
desires. The tone of British comment upon America, as a result, has
tended to cease to be the amused interest of, say, Mrs. Trollope’s Notions
of the Americans, and to become more the angry resentment of Dickens’
American Notes.
That change of temper has been compounded, in turn, by the new
difficulties of the British domestic scene. The Labour party is passing
through the transitional period which attends all left-wing parties once
they attain to power; for such parties promise release from the economic
stresses of capitalism, and almost by a logic of history achieve power when
those stresses are operating in their most acute form. Emerging from the
difficulties of that paradox, British Labour is far less confident of its
central tenets. It has been compelled to recognize that the old adage
1

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2
that in a socialist society the governance of men would give way to the
administration of things harbored an excessive simplification of the complex
relationships between man, society, and nature. It has learned that the
problems involved in the multiform activities of the state do not funda-
mentally change merely because there has been a change in the personnel
of government; and it has come to recognize, even more, that there was
perhaps some validity in the eternal insistence of William Morris that
success in the parliamentary arena would destroy the qualities of hope
and brotherhood without which a socialist movement is no more than dust
and ashes. It has been a natural temptation, out of all that, to see America
as the villain of the piece. The temptation has been strengthened by the
suspicion that, at least since 1940, the spirit of bold institutional renovation
characteristic of the early and middle periods of the New Deal has been
lost. During the Civil War the Lancashire working class could ardently
support the North despite the fact that the naval blockade of the South
brought widespread unemployment and distress to their cotton industry;
and in 1865 Marx could persuade the General Council of the International
in London to send congratulations to President Lincoln on his re-election.
It would be difficult to imagine such acts of sympathy and solidarity in the
nineteen-fifties. The British Left feels, on the whole, that the American
preoccupation with &dquo;security&dquo; has effectively stifled any possibility of
adventuresome reform within, and that, outside, the reality of American
purpose is better expressed by Mr. Henry Luce’s phrase &dquo;the American
century&dquo; than by Mr. Wallace’s demand for &dquo;the century of the common
man.&dquo; Granted the shift of power from Whitehall to Washington, it is
only natural that the suspicion should also have become sensitivity. It is
not too much to say that Britain, in common with Western Europe, feels
rather like a Hellas that has watched the center of the classical world
move from Athens to Rome and whose culture and learning must now
serve the bolder purposes of a younger and more aggressive republic.
The contemporary literature of British socialism is evidence that it
has less assurance about its certitudes than had the original founders. Mr.
Tawney argues, in the best empirical manner, that the fear of the totali-
tarian socialist state quite ignores the total culture and the moral climate
within which the state in England has grown up;’ while Mr. Gordon,
Walker is convinced that we must reconstruct socialist theory by going
back beyond the Cartesian heresy to the recognition of original sin.2 The
younger Fabians want larger measures of institutional decentralization in
the nationalized industries;3 Mr. Bevan, on the other hand, speaking from
1
R. H. Tawney, "Social Democracy in Britain," The Christian Demand for Social Justice, ed. William
Scarlett (New York: Signet Books, 1949).
2
P. C. Gordon-Walker, Restatement of Liberty (London: Hutchinson, 1951).
3 R. H. S. Crossman and others, New Fabian Essays (London: Turnstile Press, 1952).

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his ministerial experience, wants a more effective parliamentary control
over what he terms the &dquo;constitutional outrage&dquo; of the quasi-independent
boards of control.4 The right-wing Labourite advocates, in foreign policy,
the growth of a more friendly alliance with the United States because
the progressive forces within the American economy constitute a real
support of the &dquo;containment&dquo; thesis; the Bevanites, however, view the
State Department with an active skepticism.5 Many of these confusions
of thought are quite simply due to the new responsibility that always comes
with power. More of them, however, spring from the climate of thought
of the present age. The closed world of the Fabians of 1889 has become
a global universe. Their socialism was really Victorian liberalism expanded
to include the social conscience of the times; there is, after all, very
little difference between their literature and a book like Hobhouse’s
Liberalism. But the age of reason is increasingly being replaced by the
age of the public confessional. We live in a period in which men reveal
without shame their private agonies of spirit in much the same way as
the religious controversialists of the seventeenth century wrote their im-
passioned autobiographies of salvation with the conviction that their
citations from Scripture were incontestable proof of the creeds they had
embraced. The American literature of the ex~Communist is too well,
known to warrant attention. But the phenomenon of a Fabian like Mr.
R. H. S. Crossman re-establishing intellectual, if not psychic, communica-
tion with the spirits of Calvin and Pascal is evidence that the temper has
also infected the English world of radical thought.
In this babel of voices the contribution of Aneurin Bevan is especially
important, not because it possesses either logical coherence or profundity
but because it exercises exceptional influence. His emergence into national
prominence since 1945 has unleashed a volume of speculation upon his
character and his creed: if on the one side he has been dismissed as a
mere Welsh orator come, like Lloyd George before him, to harass the
Tories, he has been viewed on the other as a dangerous radical who is
likely to lead the Labour party into communism. Like many British
politicians before him, Mr. Bevan has written a book of self -explanation.
6
It is, of course, polemical rather than autobiographical. Like Mr. Attlee’s
Th~e Labour Party in Perspective of a generation ago, it is concerned less
to trace an intellectual Odyssey than to argue the case for a particular
type of socialism. Mr. Bevan possesses the extrovert qualities of the
practicing politician. It would be unfair, therefore, to expect from his
book the virtues of the classical apologias; there is here none of the
humility of Trollope and very little of the close-knit reasoning of Newman.
4
Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952), p. 98.
5
The arguments for both sides of this debate are briefly stated by John Freeman, M.P., and Denis
Healey, Rearmament
-
How
Far? Fabian Tract No. 288 (London: Fabian Publications Ltd., 1951).
6
Bevan, op. cit.

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4
There is more than a tendency, characteristic of most debaters, to equate
oratory with thought; and that habit, in turn, discourages calm reflection
and creative imagination. The account, nevertheless, is important because
it tackles some of the major problems of theory and practice that confront
British socialism today and because, too, it reveals the dilemma, portrayed
at times with a quite unintended poignancy, that confronts the convinced
British socialist as he attempts to adjust his outlook to the reality of
American power.
II
Mr. Bevan’s general social doctrine is Marxist. But it is an English
rather than a continental Marxism. It accepts the view that the primary
social experience is that of the working class; but it abjures the vision
of a proletarian Armageddon as the necessary prelude to the classless
society. It believes that production forces, and the parallelogram of
property-relationships that they create, are the proper clue to the nature
of a society; but, by and large, it avoids the type of arid speculation
purveyed in Communist journals like the...