Psychological socialism: The Labour Party and qualities of mind and character, 1931 to the present

By Jeremy Nuttall

To Labour’s first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, socialism meant not only ‘satisfactory figures of death rates and …improved houses’ but also the ‘mental cleanliness, the moral robustness of our people.’ This book explores the neglected theme of individual character and ‘mental qualities’ in British social democratic thought and Labour Party history. How important was it for the centre-left that citizens be ‘good people’? What was the relationship between socialism and psychology in the 1930s? Did Labour’s technocratic, statist socialism of the 1950s and 1960s downgrade moral and mental progress? Why was the party often more concerned to produce a ‘rationally planned’ economy that rational, independent-minded citizens? Does New Labour represent a sidelining of ethical socialism or a re-birth of the pre-war left’s belief in improvement through education and self-control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847796325

Jeremy Nuttall

Jeremy Nuttall is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Kingston University

Book preview

1

Introduction

The main purpose of the book

This book focuses on the Labour Party’s attitude to the idea of ‘mental progress’. This idea is perhaps most closely associated with Victorian Liberals and socialists. Stefan Collini suggests:

Progress was the pattern into which the educated late-Victorian Englishman naturally fitted both his perceptions of the past and his expectations of the future. Unless challenged, this was usually implicit … Economic and technological growth was certainly the most tangible manifestation of Progress, and the one which in the later part of the century could be most easily demonstrated. But this was not the most important aspect: it was the, frequently related, assumptions of intellectual and moral advance which provided the fundamental motif of the pattern.¹

‘Mental progress’ is defined in this book as incorporating both the moral and the intellectual advance mentioned by Collini. It relates to the idea of citizens both behaving more caringly and less selfishly towards others, and thinking more rationally and logically. Aspects of it are encapsulated in the Victorian idea of ‘character’. Bellamy notes that

character consisted in the ability to rise above sensual, animal instincts and passions through the force of will. A variety of conventional Victorian middle-class virtues clustered around this key concept, such as sobriety, self-help, frugality, industry, duty, and independence, which taught thrift and effort as the means to worldly success rather than luck and an eye to the main chance. Underwriting this liberal outlook was a fundamental faith in the goodness and rationality of humankind and the belief that individual moral improvement would lead to social progress.²

The idea of ‘mental progress’ could underpin both Liberal and socialist thinking. For example, according to Bellamy, the Liberal thinker T.H. Green hoped that ‘once everyone valued the higher goods for themselves, then the market would be transformed from a competition in which each person sought to beggar his or her neighbour into one in which everyone strove to outdo each other in moral virtue’.³ And the socialist Graham Wallas, one of the contributors to Fabian Essays (1889), wrote in his chapter: ‘in the households of the five men out of six in England who live by weekly wage, Socialism would indeed be a new birth of happiness. … Education, refinement, leisure, the very thought of which now maddens them, would be part of their daily life.’⁴

It is not the purpose of this book to suggest that the achievement of ‘mental progress’ was the main purpose of the Labour Party since 1931. Attention to and support of such a goal was clearly only a strand in Labour’s thinking and usually not the most central. But as the Labour Party has been widely seen, by historians and contemporaries, as the most important vehicle for progress in twentieth-century Britain, it is illuminating to study both the ways in which it did explore means of achieving ‘mental progress’, and also, to the extent that it did not focus on such a goal, why that was so, why other goals were deemed more important. A central focus will be on how Labour’s leading thinkers and actors defined socialism, and what role they saw for ‘mental progress’ within that socialist vision. How far was it deemed essential that to achieve a socialist, and thus, perhaps, more cooperative society, individuals must behave more generously towards each other? How much was a popular recognition of the supposed rational superiority or even scientific inevitability of socialism dependent upon the average citizen becoming more intelligent, and therefore better able to realise this superiority or inevitability? And how important was ‘mental progress’ relative to other branches of the left’s and centre-left’s visions, such as the creation of social structural, material and institutional equalities?

The book is also concerned with how Labour figures’ interpretation of the ‘moral level’ of the citizenry affected their thinking in relation to ‘mental progress’, and indeed to progress as a whole. If most people had not yet reached the ‘higher’ moral and intellectual level, how much of a constraint was this on the achievement of progress, and in what ways could socialist politicians validly operate in the meantime? In such a ‘mental context’, did Labour have a duty not simply to promote ‘ideal’ motives and behaviour, such as altruism, caring, cooperation and rationality, but also to work with, and indeed, seek to spread more ‘middling’-level motives, like competition or ‘common sense’? In other words, if the alternative to ‘middling’ motives was sometimes not ‘ideal’ motives, but ‘worst’ motives, for example, laziness, aggressive militancy or apathy, then did Labour need to take care to ensure its ideal did not become the enemy of society’s mediocre?

Table 1.1 helps illustrate such questions. It is not designed as a rigid definition of what constituted ‘ideal’, ‘middling’, and ‘worst’ societies in the eyes of socialists. Clearly, few, if any socialists saw things in such a systematic way, and many would have placed some features in different columns. Clearly, also, not all the categories are mutually exclusive, and they are often multi-dimensional. The ideal behaviour in cultural terms, for example, has, at different times, been defined on the basis of such diverse features as being active yet reflective, or highly emotionally stimulated and yet tranquil. There were also plenty of twentieth-century progressives who regarded sex as one of the highest, or at least most fulfilling emotions. Instead, then, the table serves as a framework, illustrating some specific features of some socialists’ thought, but also the very broad idea of different ‘levels’ of social advancement. These differing levels help explain why different ideologies at times slid into each other in the twentieth century, in the sense that Labour’s ‘realism’ in accepting a need sometimes to promote ‘middling’, and not just ‘ideal’-level qualities of mind and values was in a sense an acceptance of some validity in the gradualist approach to politics more commonly associated with Conservatism.

Table 1.1 ‘Ideal’, ‘middling’ and ‘worst’ features of society

Finally, the book is also interested in the motivations of Labour thinkers and actors themselves, or, more precisely, in how much they deemed those motivations to matter to the achievement of progress. If ‘mental progress’ was an important component in socialism, was setting a personal example of good behaviour as morally necessary and/or potent a means of achieving socialism as specific policies or even ideas? And if ‘mental progress’ was important, did this mean that a ‘good example’ included one’s behaviour in personal relationships as much as decisions to resist the temptations of private medical care or private schools for one’s offspring? How far could ambitions of elevated personal political or social status be justified if one professed adherence to socialist principles of equality of status and worth?

Having stated the purpose of the book, the remainder of this introductory chapter addresses four main aspects. First, it discusses the existing focus of the historiography of the Labour Party, and asserts the absence of a systematic consideration of its attitude to the issue of qualities of mind and character. Second, it highlights some reasons for this absence. Third, it suggests, in five separate sections, how the theme of this book will illuminate five central issues and debates relating to Labour’s history. Fourth, it outlines the particular approach of the book, and considers methodological questions.

Inattention to qualities of mind in Labour Party historiography

Victorian and early-twentieth-century attitudes towards altruism and ‘character’ have been given some attention, notably by Stefan Collini in his Public Moralists (1991), though Jose Harris could still reflect in 1993 that whilst ‘the role of moral character in late Victorian and Edwardian social thought has been almost universally noted by interpreters of the period, … [it] has rarely received the kind of scrutiny that its historical importance seems to require’.⁵ But such attention as has been given has not been extended beyond the first quarter of the twentieth century, that is to say into the period when Labour, not the Liberals, were the dominant political party. Throughout the Labour Party’s history, its members and leaders have pursued various aims, their progress towards which has been correspondingly chronicled by historians, including to: build and develop the party as an institution;⁶ win elections;⁷ secure internal victories for particular factions;⁸ differently run, or better manage the economy;⁹ create egalitarian social structures and institutions;¹⁰ fulfil personal ambitions (numerous biographies have charted the course of these ambitions);¹¹ implement policy;¹² or think and write about socialist ideology.¹³ Much enlightenment has resulted from these historiographical focuses, but attention to the role of qualities of mind and character in Labour Party history is not amongst them. The party’s historians have not examined the multi-faceted issue of ‘mental progress’ in relation to Labour’s history to the degree that they have considered, say, economic progress or progress towards equality.

This is not to say that the issue of qualities of mind and character has been entirely ignored in Labour Party historiography. In fact, there have been a number of works, especially in recent years, which have considered themes relevant to that of this book, and from which it benefits. Specifically, the book draws on four existing strands of writing, even though their principal concerns lie elsewhere than a systematic consideration of Labour in relation to qualities of mind and character since 1931. The first strand consists of the loosely connected writing on ethical socialism, ‘moral politics’ and emotions in relation to the party. Peter Catterall has written on the relationship between the Labour Party and Protestant Nonconformists in the inter-war years.¹⁴ David Marquand has highlighted the difference between those politicians with a ‘moral’ vision for the citizenry and those without as a cleavage in twentieth-century British political history meriting consideration alongside the more remarked upon division between left and right.¹⁵ Borrowing the terminology of Peter Clarke, Marquand suggested that ‘moral’ reformers sought ‘inner changes of value and belief’, whereas ‘mechanical’ ones settled for mere ‘outward changes of structure and law’.¹⁶ Which label Marquand applied to which reformers will be discussed later in this chapter. Martin Francis has emphasised that the Attlee governments had a strong ethical vision, as well as one concerned with combating material inequalities through the welfare state.¹⁷ Finally, Francis has also explored Labour’s commitment to restraint, rationality and order in the immediate post-war period and its corresponding suspicion of uncontrolled emotion.¹⁸

The second strand of writing can be characterised, again loosely, as that relating to the political culture of the party, and to the attitudes of the citizenry towards socialism, or of the Labour Party towards the citizenry. Chris Waters has considered socialist attitudes to popular culture between 1884 and 1914.¹⁹ Stuart Macintyre has written about Labour’s and Marxists’ response to working-class political apathy in the 1920s, and reflected on Labour’s sense then that ‘the raising up of public mentality was the regulator of its political progress’.²⁰ Steven Fielding has explored the political mood of the electorate at the 1945 election, suggesting it was not as idealistic as had traditionally been supposed, and, building on this, in collaboration with Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, he has examined popular political attitudes during the Attlee governments, highlighting both the ethical, moral side of Labour’s vision, even of apparent apparatchiks such as Herbert Morrison, and also the constraint which a relatively non-idealistic citizenry imposed upon the achievement of this vision.²¹ Lawrence Black has highlighted Labour’s hostility towards what it saw as the immorality of the affluent society between 1951 and 1964, and the electoral damage the party did to itself by the undiscriminating nature of this hostility.²²

Third, there has been analysis of the main political parties’ attitudes to specific issues relating to individual morality. Stephen Jones has narrated Labour’s attitudes to alcohol consumption in the inter-war years.²³ Peter Thompson has explored aspects of Labour’s perspectives towards the alleged creation of the ‘permissive society’ in the 1960s.²⁴ Turning to the role of specific moral issues in the broader context of British politics, Martin Durham has examined the ways in which the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s was unhappy with this ‘permissive society’, and attempted to toughen the rules in such areas as pornography and abortion, though not by as much as many campaigners would have wished.²⁵ Nevertheless, Conservative Party historiography, much less voluminous than writing on Labour, even after the surge of work in recent years, has also given little systematic attention to the issue of qualities of mind and character.

The fourth strand emanates from writers of political science and philosophy. These have begun to highlight the importance of personal attitude and choice to the achievement of progress or socialism, on the basis of the assumption that society is, to some to degree, an accumulation of the personal decisions of the individuals whom it comprises. G.A. Cohen, in his If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, has explored the complex arguments surrounding the neglected question of whether those who profess egalitarianism should give away various percentages of their own income in order to promote it through their personal example.²⁶ Central to Cohen’s thinking on this is his sense that political philosophy has neglected the issue of attitude:

Egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of the rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice; personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. These truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should inform it …²⁷

Similarly, Adam Swift has examined the moral issues relevant to the question of how left-leaning parents should make the decision as to whether to send their children to non-comprehensive secondary schools.²⁸ Related issues have been explored in Kate Soper’s chapter on ‘Socialism and Personal Morality’.²⁹

Reasons for historiographical neglect of qualities of mind

Nevertheless, the overall picture remains one of neglect of the issue of qualities of mind and character in relation to the Labour Party. Despite the fact that a large part of Labour Party history has been written through the medium of biography,³⁰ and that therefore much has been written on the particular personality traits of individual Labour figures, character as an issue has been little considered. There are perhaps three main reasons for this. The first is that historians of the party understandably share some of the assumptions of the historical subject, the Labour Party, which most interests them. Thus, whilst often being sharply critical of Labour’s economic policy or its specific policies for changing the structure of society, they have not usually been interested in explaining the existence of the very assumption of many in the party that material or social structural priorities were what mattered most.

Second, historians have been, again understandably, reluctant to be perceived to be moralising, and this may have made them wary of traversing the terrain of the history of assumptions about the idea of ‘mental progress’. For example, the historian of Labour’s thought, Geoffrey Foote, criticised some of the Labour revisionist Evan Durbin’s exploration of politics in terms of psychology, by noting that ‘many radical psychologists would argue that we are all living in a neurotic society anyway, and that nobody is in a position to moralise’.³¹ Progressives, whether as a product of their emphasis on individual liberty, or their understanding that individual acts of immorality cannot necessarily be blamed on the individual, but are caused by a wide range of psychological and social forces, have sometimes concluded with the non sequitur that individual morality is a secondary concern. In this respect, progressive historians are no exception.

Third, historians have focused, to some extent legitimately, on what most preoccupied historical actors at the time. There is little doubt that issues such as economic policy or personal political ambition did concern many people in the Labour Party more than objectives of moral and intellectual progress. The focus of this book is therefore as much on a negative as a positive. The interest is as much in surveying factors which sometimes caused Labour to regard issues of character or mental progress as a secondary concern as in exploring the various ways in which it did devote attention to such issues. In this respect, it follows something of the approach of Ross McKibbin in his essay on ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’³² Such an approach can, of course, be dangerous if it becomes mere speculation. Equally, though, at times overspecialisation in the historical profession has left too little room for questions such as McKibbin’s, which facilitate consideration of the broader trends and patterns in history. It is, for example, as valuable broadly to reflect on the question, ‘Why was there not more caring in Britain?’, not only drawing on primary sources, but bringing together secondary ones, as it is to work on micro-studies of what did happen in Britain.

Caring and intelligent citizens as a prerequisite for socialism

There are five broad ways in which the theme of this book feeds usefully into key areas of debate in Labour historiography. The first key historiographical area concerns Labour’s disappointment that it did not manage to create a ‘socialist society’ in the twentieth century to the extent that it wished. As Stuart Macintyre has put it in relation to the 1920s:

A problem of crucial importance confronted the British labour movement in the 1920s. The working class – those who earned their livelihood by selling their labour power, as well as their dependents – constituted a majority of the population. To the left it seemed manifest that their interests lay in ending a social system which exploited them and putting socialism in its place. Yet during the decade only a minority of British voters committed themselves to socialism, even at the minimal level of voting for the Labour party.³³

This situation did not change, even following the governments that are usually seen as the most successful in the party’s history. Revisionist historians have convincingly challenged the traditional view that the Second World War produced some fundamental and lasting radicalisation of the citizenry. Fielding, Thompson and Tiratsoo, for example, have referred to the Attlee governments’ ‘inability to make socialists on the scale anticipated in 1945’.³⁴ These governments have normally been judged by their success in implementing large-scale nationalisation and a welfare state. But many in the party wanted something more. ‘Socialism is not bread alone’, insisted the 1950 manifesto. ‘Economic security and freedom from the enslaving bonds of capitalism are not the final goals. They are means to the greater end – the evolution of a people more kindly, intelligent, free, co-operative, enterprising and rich in culture.’³⁵

There was a strong argument that without changes in citizens’ psychological makeup, their ability and willingness to reason, and above all their morals, socialism or social democracy would always lack solid foundations. For example, a social democratic society arguably required citizens who were prepared to sacrifice personal income by paying higher taxes to fund better public services, and also, perhaps more fundamentally still, responsible parents prepared to raise their children by example, not just precept, according to principles of individual and social responsibility. In the eyes of the philosopher and Labour revisionist Bryan Magee in 1962, ‘caring about other people is the emotional basis of radicalism’.³⁶ The requirements could be seen as similar with regard to intelligence. Without citizens prepared to think carefully and analytically, they might always be vulnerable to the propaganda of powerful commercial and media vested interests. Furthermore, for some socialists, and others within the broader progressive tradition, expanding opportunities for people to develop themselves morally and intellectually was an important aim in itself, regardless of whether the development of such qualities would make people more likely to vote Labour or see themselves as socialists. Improving people’s minds could thus be seen as a prerequisite for the lasting achievement of many of Labour’s other reformist aims, and/or an objective in its own right.

Yet, Labour figures in the years between 1931 and the present have rarely discussed in depth the objective of a more kindly or caring society, still less analysed systematically how to promote it. Instead, equality or nationalisation have often stood as proxies for caring. Thus, when Magee reflected that caring was the emotional basis of radicalism, he could go on to argue that ‘if you really care about people and regard them as the only ends, you will want a huge increase in, quite simply, equality [Magee’s italics]’.³⁷ Here, caring was deemed to matter, but Magee was not minded to refer to it as an end in itself. On the one hand, his connection was logical. Caring could be seen to be manifest in the assumption that all were of equal worth, and that this in turn had policy implications in relation to, for example, the distribution of incomes. On the other hand, the connection also illustrated an interesting process in the history of the ideas of the time whereby one idea or value was reduced to another. The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin has highlighted the important element of intellectual confusion in such reduction in the following simple, yet profound comment: ‘everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience’.³⁸ Similarly, caring did not in itself mean equality, it meant caring. A danger with proxies, with assuming that simply by supporting policies seen to be associated with equality one was showing that one ‘cared’, could be seen to have been that they have not always held true to the original. For example, it is indisputable that the promotion of what seemed to be egalitarian institutions and structures in Britain after 1945, whether in the form of material redistribution or comprehensive schools, did not always add to the national sum of caring or kindliness. In other words, theoretically egalitarian structures did not necessarily produce egalitarian (altruistic or caring) attitudes. This book thus seeks to highlight and set in historical context instances where qualities of mind have been reduced to other, often economic or social structural goals and policies.

Twentieth-century socialists were critical of capitalists for regarding the labour force as merely another factor of production in the economy. Yet they often themselves shared with their capitalist opponents a sense that economics mattered most. This was partly a response to the immediate and pressing material poverty of the disadvantaged social groups Labour represented, a form of poverty that was more tangible than moral and intellectual deprivation. Though, the more the decades of the twentieth century passed and absolute poverty declined, the more other explanations must be found for this prioritisation of material problems, including simply that it had become socialist custom. The focus on economic questions was unsurprisingly most marked on the Marxist-influenced left. But this book suggests it was also characteristic of the right-wing, pragmatic centre and trade-union elements in the party.

This is not to say that Labour has been entirely uninterested in the goal of ‘mental progress’. The objective in fact consistently informed varying parts of the party’s assumptions and thinking. It was more prominent in the thinking of some Labour figures than others. Broadly, the picture painted in this book is as follows. First, no leading Labour thinker or politician either elevated the goal of improving the mental qualities of the citizenry to the status of overriding objective, or offered a systematic intellectual exploration of this as an aim, and of the means of and obstacles to achieving it. Whereas economic and egalitarian goals were considered systematically, mental ones were not. Second, however, some figures did place a strong emphasis on the need for a greater moral, intellectual or educational dimension to politics, though this emphasis was usually on a broad level and often coexisted with a continued implicit assumption that economics mattered most. Such figures were often on the peripheries of the party rather than in active politics or leadership positions. They include R.H. Tawney, Richard Acland, members of the Socialist Union, which placed a strong emphasis in the 1950s on members displaying their commitment to socialism by personal example, and later intellectual figures such as David Marquand and Raymond Plant. Third, there were a significant number of mainstream Labour politicians who, whilst not giving a ‘mental’ agenda a dominant position, were clearly more guided by such an agenda than the average amongst their peers. These included, on the ‘moral’ side, Stafford Cripps, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair, and on the intellectual side, Richard Crossman and Tony Crosland. Fourth, for a substantial number, perhaps the majority of the party, at least at ‘elite’ level (this study does not attempt to analyse the attitudes of the party as a whole), there was an assumption that the economy, and the structure of power in society, mattered most, but this was accompanied by an, admittedly vague, sense of long-term moral vision, and either a periodic or occasional unease that perhaps the moral side of socialism was being too much subordinated. ‘Pragmatic’ figures such as Herbert Morrison and Jim Callaghan fall into this category. Hence, this book seeks to present a complex picture of Labour’s attitude to qualities of mind and character, with most figures giving them some sort of consideration, but few or none giving the goal of improving minds the attention devoted to nationalisation, economic growth or structural egalitarian reforms.

Labour’s uncertainty as to how high a priority it should accord to the promotion of particular qualities of mind and character raises the issue of chronology, specifically whether British political thinkers and actors have embraced a ‘moral’ agenda more at certain times than others. Stefan Collini has argued that the ideal of character ‘enjoyed a prominence in the political thought of the Victorian period that it had apparently not known before and that it has, arguably, not experienced since’.³⁹ As touched on earlier, such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and T.H. Green saw an increase in altruism or the possession of good character as one of the major measures of social progress. Collini points to H.G. Wells’s novel, The New Machiavelli (1911) as symbolising the drift away from these concerns. In the book, Wells’s fictional alter ego, Richard Remington, personified and articulated a growing twentieth-century emphasis on science and efficiency over morals. Remington complained of ‘the cant about character’, and reflected that Britain was like a brontosaurus, whose ‘backbone … is bigger than its cranium’.⁴⁰

The twentieth century was not monolithic, though, in its attitude towards the role of morality in politics and progress. Writing in 1996, David Marquand identified five phases in post-Second World War British political history. These alternated between the ‘passive-hedonistic’ and the ‘moralist-activist’. This divide cut across the traditional left-versus-right or collectivist-versus-individualist ones, as Marquand explains:

Individualism can be passive and hedonist, or active and moralist. So can collectivism. Individual liberty can be valued, in other words, because it allows individuals to satisfy freely-chosen desires, to live as they please so long as they do not prevent others from doing the same. Or it can be valued because it enables them to lead purposeful, self-reliant and strenuous lives, because it encourages them to take responsibility for their actions and, in doing so, to develop their moral potential to the full. By the same token, collective action and collective provision may be seen as instruments for maximising morally-neutral satisfaction, or as the underpinnings of personal and cultural growth, of engagement in the common life of the society and so of self-development and self-fulfilment.⁴¹

In Marquand’s chronology, during the first phase, lasting from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, a moralist-activist collectivism was dominant, symbolised in the approach of the Liberal Beveridge and Labour’s Attlee and Cripps. Rights and duties were seen to go hand in hand, the welfare state with peacetime conscription, resource redistribution with civic activism. The second phase, which replaced this, was passive-hedonist collectivist, and lasted until the mid-1970s. It was informed by the moral relativism that Keynes had learned at Cambridge and Bloomsbury, even though he himself died in 1946. The Labour Keynesian economists like Gaitskell and Crosland saw themselves as economic technicians more than moralists, and viewed reference to duties as patronising and elitist. And, as Marquand puts it, ‘equality came to be seen as a good in itself, irrespective of the uses to which the fruits of egalitarian policies were put’.⁴²

This moral vacuum, in Marquand’s eyes, left Keynesian social democracy vulnerable to moral attack from the New Right, this leading to a third phase, that of moralist-activist individualism, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The argument here was that free-market forces were superior not only on the grounds of efficiency, but because only free individuals could be moral agents, self-sufficient and independent-minded. In addition, ‘Victorian values’ were emphasised. However, phase four, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s saw a switch to passive-hedonist individualism, as easy credit and incautious tax reductions fuelled a consumer boom, with Essex Man replacing Alderman Roberts as the icon of Thatcherism. At Marquand’s time of writing, he pointed to the apparent development of a fifth phase, characterised by the moralist-activist collectivism of Blair’s New Labour.⁴³

This is a very useful chronology. As Marquand acknowledges, the periodisation is obviously an oversimplification,⁴⁴ but it highlights shifting priorities. Two important caveats should be made to this book’s overall acceptance of Marquand’s analysis. First, the social ‘spheres’ considered in this book are not quite the same as Marquand’s. Marquand writes from what one might call a ‘political’ perspective, whereas this book is more exclusively interested in Labour’s assumptions relating to the character of the individual. In other words, Marquand is interested in the institutions and political economy that might reflect or promote active and responsible citizens. Virtue, in this political sense, is equated with activism and with a policy agenda. The scope of this book is both narrower and broader. It is interested in individual character itself, and its treatment by Labour figures, regardless of whether it seems to have a ‘political’ relevance as defined by the political agenda of reforming the economy, institutions and social structures. It is less interested in the institutions and structures themselves. And it is uneasy with the automatic associations of activist with moralist and passive with hedonist. As Marquand implies, with his definition of the moralist-activist as one who believes ‘that it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied’, morality could be evident in thought as much as action.⁴⁵ It could also arguably be manifested as much by restraint from doing things as by doing them, for example by refraining from pursuing selfish personal ambitions, or by adhering to some principle of sexual fidelity or responsibility. On this latter point, in attempting to explain the Victorian intellectual emphasis on altruism, Collini reflects that

from the standpoint of late twentieth-century knowingness, it is hard not to hypothesise about the ways it may have been related to a kind of distancing of the sexual instincts … [To Freud, altruism was] ‘distinguished by the absence of longings for sexual satisfaction’. Comte, when coining the term altruisme, had perhaps been alive to this negative connection, since he ‘never ceased to deplore the sexual instincts as the most disturbing of the egoistic propensities’, ‘the least capable of being usefully transformed’, one of ‘the chief imperfections of human existence’.⁴⁶

Writing of the 1950s’ liberal Labour revisionists’ rather different attitude, Kenneth Morgan suggested in 1987 that ‘[Hugh] Gaitskell, like [Tony] Crosland, is surely to be commended for setting his face against that Puritanism which disfigures so much of the labour movement, and for an outgoing, human enjoyment of parties, dancing, and the company of pretty women’.⁴⁷ Clearly, the revisionists were partly seeking to make the point that socialism should enhance, not stifle gaiety. But the separate issue of the overriding centrality of sexual feelings to the pursuit of that gaiety in contemporary British history – and such feelings often play a central part in the three activities Morgan listed – has not always been considered unproblematic from a progressive or socialist perspective, either in the acts or the mental preoccupations it produced. The according of a high or overriding priority to sex has been seen by some as an obstacle to progress or social democracy, in the sense that it