Sidney Webb: Utilitarianism, Positivism, and Social Democracy

Abstract

In so far as social and political practices require their participants to possess a certain understanding of the world, we can explore the historical roots of the practices by asking how the relevant understanding arose. To do so, of course, we have to treat texts as guides to shifts in thought and language rather than as strategic interventions aimed at producing immediate effects; we have, in other words, to abstract from the short-term considerations embodied in texts so as to explore the ways they instantiate long-term changes in the ideas and concepts at play within a society. Strangely intellectual historians who study Webb's political thought almost never explore his early and largely unpublished manuscripts. 8 Doing so suggests he belongs in an intellectual milieu peculiar to the late Victorian era. Webb was an ethical positivist in a sense that was common then but had almost no precursors in the early Victorian era and retained few adherents by the 1930s. Although historians have long assigned ethical positivism a place in Victorian thought, they generally locate it exclusively among those who stood on the side of Culture against Society -romantics and idealists rather than utilitarians and rationalists. 9 Recently, however, historians Although intellectual historians rarely pick-up on the discontinuity between Webb and the utilitarians, we can find a gesture towards it within social history. Here historians have accounted for the rise of social democracy and the welfare state by reference to a new class-structure. Within the received historiography, the progressive architects of modern social policy represented a new class whose ideas either blunted the creativity of the working class or dovetailed with the natural tendency of trades unions to adopt labourism rather than true socialism. Webb thus gets portrayed as representative of a technocratic and managerial elite whose class position led them to advocate a bureaucratic and statist form of social democracy or managed capitalism. 11 Recently, however, historians such as Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce have initiated a linguistic turn that reacts sharply against this received historiography with its assumptions about modernization and class-formation. 12 All too often, the received historiography took for granted the ideas of those it purported to tell us about: if we 6 6 assume the welfare state is bureaucratic and social democracy is statist, and if we assume technocrats thrive in bureaucratic and statist systems, it is all too easy to assume the new class actively espoused and built such a system. Once we follow recent historiographical trends and pay greater attention to the beliefs and language of those we study, however, we will find that the bureaucratic rhetoric of Webb's moral exhortations did not translate into excessively centralised or extensive forms of collectivism. Webb's ethical positivism lead him to a strong collectivist morality in which individuals had to fulfil themselves through the greater whole; but his positivist social...

Searching for civil society: changing patterns of governance in Britain

“…From the earliest days, a central strand in the Socialist tradition is the role accorded to bureaucracy. For example, the leading Fabian, Sidney Webb, identified socialism with the efficient organization of society conceived as co-operative and co-ordinated organization with state activity (Bevir 2002). The Fabians, he implied, should act as positivist experts, providing information and policies to diverse politicians.…”

“…The socialist or Fabian reform lineage is so obvious it hardly needs documenting. It emerges in the Webbs' preference for expertise and efficiency in the bureaucracy (Bevir 2002). It runs through Robson (1937), Greaves (1947), Balogh (1962), 'The Administrators ' (1964), Fulton (Cmnd 3638, 1968, and Garrett (1972) as well as Kellner and Crowther Hunt (1980).…”

Humanism in Islamic Education: Indonesian References

“…This opposition reached its peak when Auguste Comte (1798-1857) declared a "humanitarian religion" to be a replacement for religion, which was considered inhumane (Blanchard 1918;Bevir 2002). This conflict continued until the mid-20th century, when the Christian leaders began to show an appreciation for humanism.…”

Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Institutional Theory of Labor Markets and Wage Determination

“…They and fellow Fabians (e.g., Hobson 1891) were attracted to the law of economic rent as it had an impeccable British pedigree (Ricardo 1817(Ricardo /1937; could be developed in the new marginalist framework popularized by Jevons and Marshall; had acquired worldwide attention through the proselytizing efforts of "single land tax" Henry George; and can be applied to labor markets in a way that brings in the social/institutional structure surrounding DS, and opens up greater analytic and ethical space in economic theory for a positive role for trade unions, social reform, and redistribution of wealth and power. Because their theory of wage determination is grounded on Ricardo's rent theory, it has become known in the small follow-up literature simply as "rent theory" (Bevir 1989;Lobdell 1995;Ricci 1969); however, to keep the Webbs' version distinct from other theories of rent, I label it "Webbian rent theory" (WRT).…”