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Something in the Porter: The Strange Career of British Anarchism
A review of David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward
In the aftermath of the Second World War, British anarchism was making a long-delayed, if modest, appearance as an intellectual and political movement. At about the same time, a prominent English economist tried to describe, briefly, die kind of world he would like to live in. He wished that "human society may become a friendly society" organized as "an affiliated order of branches, some small, each with its own life in freedom, each linked to the rest by common purpose and by bonds to serve that purpose."
The author of these words wasn't Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, or any of the other UK writers and artists who defined themselves as anarchists. Nor did this statement appear in Freedom, the London-based magazine that was reintroducing anarchism to a small but growing segment of the British public. It was spoken by William Beveridge, one of the architects of the postwar British welfare state, including its old-age insurance provisions and the National Health Service, and a pioneer of state-based central planning.
Was it something in the water - or, perhaps, the porter? Is there such a tiling as an "indigenous" form of anarchism in Britain - and in other societies, perhaps - that even many career statists aspire to, if they only had the chance?
On the surface, British history over the last century has been a triumph of political and economic centralization. Labour governments created die welfare state, which replaced cooperative, working class-based institutions of mutual aid and self-help with state-run programs. Later, Conservative governments worked to break the power of labor unions and directed more and more of die economy into die hands of a small elite of corporate executives, bankers, and financial speculators. Both parties consolidated political power under an elite-educated, likeminded cadre of professionals and technocrats. Britain, the United Kingdom, was about bigness.
But as Beveridge s statement suggests, not everyone wanted history to turn out that way - even some of die people who drove it there. Somediing has continued to bubble under the surface. Colin Ward, perhaps the...