G.D.H. Cole and the History of Socialist Thought1

This essay is the Introduction to a new edition of G.D.H. Cole’s five-volume History of Socialist Thought, which covers not only socialist thought between 1789 and 1939 but also in the later volumes a history of socialist movements after 1848. Cole’s own contribution to socialist thought is discussed through his writings on Guild Socialism and his opposition to the centralising creeds of Marxism-Leninism and Social Democracy, which dominated the politics of the Left in the decades after the First World War. Cole gave eloquent expositions of the intellectual traditions of both Marxism-Leninism and Social Democracy, but his own deeper commitment was to the decentralised forms of socialism which he had championed when young, and he was a strong critic both of Soviet Communism and of parliamentary socialism.