Anthony Crosland was the British Labour party’s revisionistpar excellence. His most influential work,The Future of Socialism, has been described as the bible of Labour revisionism.³ This book examines Crosland’s legacy: the impact of his incisive and penetrating writings on the Labour party’s doctrine and strategy in post-war Britain. The party absorbed Crosland’s ideas into its political identity in the 1950s and 1960s, searching for a revitalised purpose having accomplished the immediate tasks of post-war reconstruction and social reform. By the time of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964, Labour was ostensibly a moderate and forward-looking party of government. This...

Anthony Crosland has been an iconic figure for generations of British social democrats; next to Aneurin Bevan he was �the most exciting Labour politician of the twentieth century’.� His writings conveyed the qualities of political relevance and intellectual élan that were in short supply in the British Labour party. Crosland had exceptional abilities ensuring that he stood out as Labour’s pre-eminent �scholar-politician’. This chapter charts the highs and lows of his career against the rise and fall of British social democracy. There were prolonged periods in which Crosland’s career stagnated, particularly following Wilson’s ascent to the leadership in 1963. During...

Crosland’sFuture of Socialisminspired the debate in the postwar Labour party about the nature of equality. His revisionism involved a vigorous commitment to egalitarian social democracy: equality was at the front and centre of Crosland’s analysis. His work offered a reference point for what kind of equality mattered in Britain: equality of opportunity where all citizens could rise through the class and occupational structure as far as their talents would take them; and equality of outcome ensuring the distribution of disposable income and resources accords with fundamental principles of social justice. Since Crosland understood equality as the pre-eminent value,...

Crosland’s mission was to equip his party with a powerful social democratic identity drawing on the liberal as well as the socialist heritage within the British political tradition. Social democracy was at heart a marriage of individual freedom and social justice: socialism was the �legitimate heir’ of liberalism.³ Despite the commitment to collective ownership of the means of production in Labour’s constitution, socialism’s �threadbare doctrines’ were inadequate in the wake of the 1951 defeat: for Crosland, liberalism was essential in reviving Labour as a credible party of government. The revisionists sought to rejuvenate British socialism assimilating prescient arguments from the...

This book’s central theme is Crosland’s influence and legacy as a revisionist theoretician in the post-war Labour party. Social democrats navigating a rapidly changing economic and political landscape latched onto Crosland as the revisionistpar excellence. As his obituary inThe Times stated, Crosland’s impact was �greater than the offices he held’.³ This chapter will step beyond domestic policy to assess the influence of European socialism and American liberalism on the development of Crosland’s political thought. It will examine the fractious debate about Britain’s role in the world, the political unification of Europe, and the possibilities of a socialist foreign...

Crosland insisted that post-war socialism must abandon consecrated slogans favouring up-to-date sociological investigation and iconoclastic political analysis. Through his numerous organisational activities and writings, Crosland contributed to discussions about the electoral and political strategy of Labour in post-war Britain. This chapter examines his legacy as a political strategist and �apparatchik’ who informed Labour about the imperative of adapting its ideas and programme in the light of economic and social change; he argued �if socialism is to survive in the modern world, it must undergo a process of modernisation’.� The strategy of renovation was paramount in the wake of Labour’s electoral...

The intellectual vitality and richness of Crosland’s political thought, alongside his qualities as a politician, meant that his influence on the Labour party since the 1950s has been pervasive. Crosland’s generation drew on the inter-war revisionism of Tawney and Durbin (Warde, 1982), alongside the radical liberal tradition. They insisted that if the British Left emphasised individual rights and freedoms by curtailing its enthusiasm for dogmatic state socialism, radical social democracy had the potential to create a fairer, more equal society. As Tawney wrote in the 1920s: �A society is free in so far as, within the limits set by nature,...

Crosland’s radical �cast of mind’ would recommend a revisionist social democratic strategy for twenty-first century Britain. The starting-point of revisionism is to comprehensively assess New Labour’s legacy, just asThe Future of Socialismwas informed by rigorous and granular analysis of Attlee’s achievements. While Attlee’s ministers presided over a war-torn economy on the verge of bankruptcy, the situation confronting New Labour was seemingly propitious. Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, the UK economy was stable with growth aided by the boom in financial services. Buoyant tax receipts flowing into the Exchequer ensured a record public sector surplus, enabling redistribution and...

This book sought to trace the impact of Crosland’s revisionist analysis on the Labour party since the publication ofThe Future of Socialismin 1956. It examined, in particular, his emphasis on equality in contradistinction to state ownership; the legacy of Crosland’s liberal progressivism in a traditionalist party of sectional interests and ambiguously socialist aspirations; the influence of continental Europe and the United States on Crosland’s reformulation of social democracy; and his view of electoral strategy in an affluent Britain characterised by rising consumption and individualism. The theme throughout is Crosland’s inheritance and the debate about ideas in the party...