Other Worlds of Labour: Liberal-Pluralism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History

Abstract

The authors challenge the conventional wisdom that dominates much of twentieth-century British labour history. They show that even recent historians, such as Selina Todd, Mike Savage and Ross McKibbin, still work from the Fabian and Marxist assumption that a united working class has been marching towards a state-socialist future. They uncover an alternative tradition of liberal-pluralism, found not only in the work of industrial relations academics, such as Hugh Clegg and Allan Flanders, but also in that of libertarian and educationalist thinkers, such as G.D.H. Cole, Michael Young and Colin Ward. They argue that labour history needs to broaden its scope from an old left obsession with state-socialism, to include a range of movements and ideas that was both more diverse and more popular than the conventional wisdom allows.