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In the four chapters of Part II, public management ideas that loosely correspond to each of the four polar world views identified by cultural theory are discussed. Here, the cultural‐theory framework is mixed with a historical perspective to survey recurring approaches to public management that can be loosely characterized as hierarchist (this chapter), individualist (Ch. 5), egalitarian (Ch. 6), and fatalist (Ch. 7). Looks briefly and selectively at four classic hierarchist approaches to public management. Two of them (Confucian public management in classical China and the cameralist tradition of early modern Europe) rarely receive a mention in conventional public‐management books—but those older traditions merit attention from present‐day students of public management, and not just for pietist or antiquarian reasons, for they show some of the different contexts in which hierarchist ideas have flourished, and their fate can help assess the strengths and weaknesses of doing public management the hierarchist way. The other two hierarchist approaches discussed are Progressivism and Fabianism.

This chapter discusses George Bernard Shaw's and Sidney Webb's respective political strategies and their roles in inspiring Fabian policy. The Fabians did not share a commitment to permeating other parties in order to promote incremental measures of socialism. For a start, Shaw would have liked an independent socialist party, but for much of the 1880s and 1890s he did not think that such a party was possible. Moreover, insofar as the leading Fabians came to agree on “permeation,” they defined it differently. Shaw thought of permeation in terms of luring Radicals away from the Liberal Party in order to form an independent party to represent workers against capitalists. In contrast, Webb defined permeation in terms of giving expert advice to the political elite. The response of the Fabian Society to the formation of the Independent Labor Party reflected the interplay of these different strategies.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book traces ways in which people collectively made various socialist projects in a complex world of mass literacy and popular politics. It explores the traditions against the background of which people turned to socialism and the dilemmas that prompted them to do so. It asks how people crafted and conceived of the diverse socialisms to which they adhered. Throughout, it concentrates on the period from 1880 to 1900. The bulk of the book consists of three parts, each covering one of the main strands of British socialism recognized at that time, namely, Marxism, Fabianism, and ethical socialism. Each part contains four chapters dealing with the leading theorists and organizations of the relevant strand of British socialism. The aim is in part to narrate the rise of British socialism as a belief system that later gained some kind of expression in an organized party and a state formation. It also shows how the diversity of British socialism was poorly captured by that party and state formation.

This chapter examines the Fabians' rejection of Marxist economics for theories arising in the wake of the collapse of classical economics. Far too many historians have caricatured the Fabians as bureaucratic elitists who were inspired by utilitarianism and classical political economy. Even when historians look more seriously at the beliefs of the Fabians, they generally argue that the Fabians adopted a reformist socialism based on a shared theory of rent derived from the classical liberalism of David Ricardo. In their view, this theory of rent blurred the distinction between classes, making it possible, first, to equate socialism not with ending capitalism but with taxation of unearned increment for the benefit of society and, second, to reject a revolutionary politics in favor of parliamentary gradualism and the permeation of bourgeois parties. However, the leading Fabians actually held different economic theories. They owed less to utilitarianism and classical political economy than to ethical positivism and neoclassical and marginal economic theories. Insofar as there is a distinctive Fabian socialism, it derives not from a shared theory of rent but from a shared endeavor by ethical positivists and liberal radicals to respond to the crisis of faith and especially the collapse of classical economics.

This concluding chapter explores the later roles of Marxism, Fabianism, and ethical socialism in the Independent Labor Party, the Labor Party, and the social democratic state. The dominant strand of socialism fused Fabianism with ethical socialism. It promoted a labor alliance to win state power within a liberal, representative democracy, and then to use the state to promote social justice. Later in the twentieth century, the rise of modernist social science altered the type of knowledge on which the Labor Party relied, with Fabian approaches to the state and policy giving way to planning, Keynesianism, and other formal expertise. Whatever type of knowledge the Labour Party relied upon to guide state intervention, it was constantly challenged by socialists opposed to its liberal concept of democracy and the role it gave to the state. These latter socialists often advocated the democratization of associations within civil society itself.

Educated and well-informed Britons and Americans radically changed the way they thought about the nature of their society as a series of philosophical, sociological, and psychological movements from idealism to Darwinism and from Fabianism to pragmatism stretched out during the 20th century. This chapter analyses the conceptual debate on liberty based on the structure of theorists. First, the chapter examines the theorists' immediate response to the conceptual agenda of their predecessors. Through this examination Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl are shown first to have adopted and then significantly radicalised the conceptual understandings their idealist, Darwinist, and pragmatist predecessors in the United States had outlined. Secondly, the chapter considers the distinctly political uses to which this conceptual approach was put, exploring the ways in which conceptual agenda and political programme were closely related together. It then presents a new interpretation of the theoretical structure and the practical scope of the ideological movement that was known as the ‘new nationalism’.

A vision for the first fifteen years of the 20th century for the United States were outlined by the nationalist progressives as a similar political philosophy is also in the works by the Fabian Society. By deriving and adapting the conceptual understanding from the idealists, both reform groups demanded far-reaching intervention to each of the individual citizen's life arguing that social harmony and personal growth can only be attained with such measures. It appeared however that the leading radical political theorists had arrived at the same broad conclusions to a blind faith mechanism of the state. The second movement introduced in this chapter is known as the ‘socialist pluralism’ in which a series of conceptual and institutional arguments are prospected to be the main focus of a significant transatlantic debate.

This chapter summarises findings from research into the work of community safety managers in Wales, entailing responses to anti-social behaviour (ASB) in each of the 22 community safety partnerships in the country. The data are used to question prevailing assumptions about the problematisation of this signal issue in popular concerns about crime and disorder. The chapter challenges two diametrically opposed but equally ‘smooth’ narratives: that governing ASB is either a morally righteous, enlightened and commonsensical campaign against a feral minority, or else that it represents a moral panic manufactured to support an increasingly punitive and intolerant state. The chapter considers the complex and hybrid narratives of disorder which underpin the problem-solving work undertaken by community safety practitioners. The resilient Fabianism of community safety managers' accounts of their own work disturbs narratives of social control in critical social science, which are in danger of believing the hype of the very political projects they seek to challenge.

This chapter presents Shaw the revisionist, opposing Marxism again. Shaw was perhaps in the strongest position to see something of the contradictions involved in European Marxism. All Socialists were agreed that they could not contradict history, impose their ideas on it arbitrarily, or suppose that they had a revolutionary cause when they in fact did not. However, Shaw was willing to step aside from the conventional, or Whiggish, sensibility of ordinary Fabianism to consider the thorny problems of practicality, of individuality, and of will. He was certainly willing to provoke Marxists by suggesting that it was Lassalle, and not Marx, who was the founder of social democracy. Most decisively, he was willing to remind European Socialists that they could not ignore the state.

This book has explained Shaw's Socialism in terms of something else: in terms of its controversial interactions with Liberalism and Marxism. The argument has been that Shaw faced this way and that; he defended some sort of Socialism from many rival doctrines but especially, definitively, and repeatedly, the doctrines of Marxism and Liberalism. Shaw remained conciliatory to revolution. He still believed that revolution was the end, and sometimes he spoke as if it were also the means. Shaw's doctrines were considered controversial by his critics for exactly this reason. Critics who had a substantive conception of the good had a less abstract sense of what they thought was wrong with Shaw. Lenin, who never met Shaw, famously declared in 1919 that he was “a good man” who had “fallen among Fabians”. But many other Marxists blamed Shaw himself and not the Fabians for what they thought was his opportunism and relativism.

Out of obscurity, Bernard Shaw was able to look to Fabianism as a representation of unconventionality and brilliance. Shaw was often recognized as a budding socialist, and was said to have fostered characteristics of vegetarianism, malnutrition, Jaegerism, and Atheism. Shaw drew inspiration from Karl Marx, Stanley Jevons, Philip Wicksteed, and Henry George, and entered the Fabian Society through an apprenticeship. In looking into Shaw's particular brand of Fabian activism, the fundamental ideas concerned are the kinds and degrees of activism that Shaw actually exercised. Through Stanley Wintraub's version of Shaw's published diaries, Anthony M. Gibb's Shaw chronology, and Dan H. Laurence'S bibliography of works by Shaw, we are able to identify specific evidence for Shaw's Fabian activities.

Among other Fabian socialists, Bernard Shaw was recognized as one who was unconventional. He saw Graham Wallas, Sydney Olivier, and Sidney Webb as comprising the Three Musketeers of Fabianism, and thought of himself to have acquired D'Artagnan's role. In spite of how many Fabian colleagues and historians would perceive Shaw to have valuable contributions, Shaw's behavior was often associated with serious problems and may have even been viewed as a hindrance to advancing Fabian goals. To add to his insufficient educational credentials, Shaw was often characterized as veering away from standard rhetoric in pursuing different lines of thought. This chapter attempts to illustrate how Shaw initiated his distinct brand of Fabianism and how he expressed support towards the permeation strategy.

This chapter details the history of social work in the United Kingdom, from its origins in the Poor Laws of the seventeenth century and the charitable organisations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the development of social work through to the mid-twentieth century. The incorporation of the ‘psy’ disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis into social work theory and practice not only provides insight into the development of the profession, but is useful in that the criticisms levelled against this incorporation appear relatively muted today, when arguably the ‘psy-complex’ is more pronounced. In Britain, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were factors in the development of social welfare. The move towards the feminisation of social work is important. This chapter also traces the history of social work to movements such as Chartism, the rise of trade unionism and class conflict, along with charity and philanthropy, Fabianism and welfarism.

Liberals and socialists variously accommodated their politics to evolutionary ideas. While historians have noted that liberals embraced social Darwinist ideas to advance either individualist laissez-faire or a collectivist social imperialism, there was a significant middle ground. By the 1870s most liberals embraced evolution to advance a progressive collectivist new-liberalism. Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley debated the merits and limits of laissez-faire in this crisis of liberal identity. Socialists were also divided on the politics of evolution and of the Malthusian elements of Darwinism in particular. The anti-Malthusianism that many radicals had brought with the movement coloured the socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890. Marxists like Henry Hyndman were also anti-Malthusian. Lamarckism proliferated throughout their various conceptions of social change. Prominent members of the Fabian Society were exceptions to this trend; embracing Malthus they built their conception of socialism around the management of societies resources.

This chapter explores the idea of the future and the transformations it underwent as a result of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on theories of historicity and temporality described by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Reinhardt Koselleck, and François Hartog, the chapter examines the various ways in which the concept of the future was disturbed by and rethought in relation to events in Russia. What happens when the word ‘socialism’—which had until 1917 been a speculation about an ideal utopian future—becomes attached to a particular state? What happens when a country renowned for its ‘backwardness’ takes on a strong association with progress? And how did writers and intellectuals respond to the Stalinist myth of the ‘Radiant Future’, which defended terror and starvation in the name of building socialism? The chapter includes analysis of works by H. G. Wells, John Cournos, C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Dorothy Richardson.

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.