Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris by Seamus Flaherty (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris by Seamus Flaherty Anna Vaninskaya (bio) Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris, by Seamus Flaherty; pp. ix + 271. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.99 paper, $79.99 ebook, £64.99. As Seamus Flaherty reminds us in the introduction and conclusion to his Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris, from the 1880s to the 1980s the history of British socialism was largely the concern of historians who were themselves socialist. Certain preconceptions within the socialist tradition thus dictated how the historiography developed; as a result, figures like those who form the focus of Flaherty's own account were misinterpreted, caricatured, or pushed to the margins and neglected. Although William Morris, the most famous (to a general Victorianist audience) of the three figures with whom the book deals, was recuperated, neither H. M. Hyndman, the leader of the first Marxist group in Britain who has been routinely dismissed as a "Tory radical," nor E. B. Bax, the Marxist philosopher consigned to obscurity as an "impractical academic," fared too well (26, 6). Accordingly, while Morris is treated relatively briefly in the final chapter, Hyndman and Bax (the stars of the account) share the rest of the book between them. Flaherty sets out to restore not just the centrality of Hyndman and Bax to the history of Marxist thought, but the centrality of non-Marxist—especially Liberal—thought to the formulation of Hyndman's, Bax's, and Morris's own views. Flaherty succeeds much more fully in the latter task than in the former. Although the evidence for direct influence is not always as strong as could be wished (there is a general tendency in the book to assume, without providing sufficiently compelling proof, that certain texts or writers are influenced by, responding to, or invoking certain others), Flaherty does a thorough job of placing Hyndman and Bax within the broader intellectual history of the late Victorian period. The book's textual analyses situate the publications of Hyndman and Bax in their wider contexts with a level of detail not always possible in synoptic overviews such as Mark Bevir's The Making of British Socialism (2011), to which Flaherty's monograph may be seen as an addendum and, in parts, a corrective. The main strength of the book is this recontextualization of early British Marxist thought as part of a much wider conversation about the meanings of socialism carried out in [End Page 363] print, and in the periodical press in particular, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Thanks to Flaherty, many figures including Herbert Spencer, Arnold Toynbee, John Morley, the British Comtists, Idealist philosophers like Thomas Hill Green and, above all, John Stuart Mill begin to loom much larger in the intellectual genealogy of British Marxism than they did before—almost as large, in some cases, as Marx and Engels themselves. Indeed, although much space is devoted to Hyndman's and Bax's relations with and departures from Engels's version of "Marxism," as well as to Bax's affinities with Eduard Bernstein's Revisionism, and Morris's sparring with the Fabians, the real interest of the book lies in its demonstration of all three men's openness to extra-socialist currents of thought (6). After reading Flaherty's book, we can never again forget that it was within and against the native tradition of Liberalism—and even more precisely, within the debates about democracy, individualism, and the state interventionist policies of the New Liberals that dominated the final decades of the century—that Hyndman, Bax, and Morris formulated their idiosyncratic brands of socialism. However, though the book's insights into the evolution of Hyndman's and Bax's thought (the former's move away from radicalism; the latter's philosophical critique of Engels's historical materialism) are interesting and the research from which these insights flow is impressive, it cannot be said that the book fulfills...