The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities

By G. R. S. Taylor, Anthony Cooney and Dr. Roger McCain

The medieval guild is deconstructed into political theory and social commentary in this contemporary look at one of the most important social institutions of the Middle Ages. Essential principles and values underlying the guild system are discussed with a view toward applying them to current societal ills such as unemployment, absentee corpora

• Language: English
• Publisher: IHS Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781605700175

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INTRODUCTION

Guilds and the Faith

N 1871 JOHN RUSKIN BEGAN a series of Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, which were to run into four volumes, published under the title Fors Clavigera.* In these letters Ruskin proposed the establishment of a Guild of St. George, which would directly and actively oppose industrialism and its waste of lives and resources. By placing his guild under the patronage of St. George, Ruskin intended to focus attention on the Christian ethos in which the social good was held superior to individual greed.† Whilst Ruskin’s Christian faith, in the sense of Credo—I believe — was, to say the least, somewhat eccentric, it is beyond dispute that his values and ethics were of a high Christian morality. It might be said that whatever his deism, he was an ethical Christian and one of the noblest minds in English history. It was from Ruskin and the Guild of St. George that William Morris and others drew their inspiration.

The development of Ruskin’s teachings by his disciples after 1906, however, certainly seems to have been away from any explicit Christian ethos, as was later to become apparent with the defection of Palme Dutt, William Gallagher, and Maurice Dobb, among others, to the newly founded Communist Party of Great Britain. After an unsuccessful attempt to take over the Fabian Society, the guild socialists established their own National Guilds League.

William Titterton described the guild approach to industrialism:

[I]t proved the virtue, the necessity, of organization from the productive unit, the master-craftsman, outwards, instead of organizing inwards from the consuming unit, conceived by the Fabians as the nation, if not the world.*

However this very high degree of organization, which has something of the ethos of Bellamy’s Looking Backwardt† about it, was the cause of division. S. G. Hobson developed a more moderate programme and had the support of A. R. Orage and the influential New Age. It was their proposed organization of all workers in a given occupation into a single guild – which would therefore have a monopoly of both labour and capital – which G. R. Stirling Taylor and A. J. Penty rejected. It might be convenient to distinguish here between the two schools of thought, reserving the term guild socialism for the organization men and guildism for the decentralists, with the proviso that the division was neither clear-cut nor hard and fast. In The Guild State, Stirling Taylor offered a pragmatic, trial-and-error approach, concluding his preface with the words: Their interpretation owes more to the teaching of everyday life than to the professors.

The guilds must not, he maintains, begin with a blue-print, a mass of regulations, caveats, and codicils, but develop organically by testing what works and rejecting what does not. They are not, in fact, a new thing, rather they have their roots in custom, in a tradition, and it is this tradition which calls men back to their roots – and what can be more radical than that? This view of society is one which echoes Chesterton’s defence of tradition in Orthodoxy as the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn. In contrast to the guild-socialist aim of National Guilds, Stirling Taylor proposes, on the medieval model, local guilds, which may be municipal or even operate in a single ward; which may have ahundred members or only a dozen; which may compete with each other, moderately, and leave choice to the customer. In comparing the author’s proposals with the social teaching of the Catholic Church it must be remembered that the economy of truth requires that the Church defines the minimum of doctrine, leaving much open to exegesis. It is in the Catholic ethos that we will find the larger concordance with guildism, rather than in the body of defined doctrine. On the issue of subsidiarity, however, we find Stirling Taylor at one with the authoritative, and subsequent, teaching of Pius XI in his 1931 Quadragesimo