Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-Politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918

Literary scholars and historians of the nineteenth century often refer to the 1880s as Britain’s socialist decade. These years saw the emergence of political organizations such as the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, and the Fabian Society, the latter of which went on to play an instrumental role in the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, which, for better or for worse, begat the modern Labour Party. Between them, these groupings brought a variety of prominent literary personnel—including William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells—into the ranks of the socialist movement, and gave rise to an internally variegated and multifaceted political, literary, and intellectual culture. Few would dispute that this specifically late-Victorian constellation has prominent antecedents earlier in the century, but Mark Allison’s detailed, comprehensive, and engaging study Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-Politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918 is relatively novel in delineating the contours of a coherent tradition that is bookended, on one side, by Robert Owen’s 1817 “Plan for the General Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor,” and, on the other, by William Morris’s conversion to the cause in 1883, which, in Allison’s telling, “marks the historical moment when British socialism and aesthetics become indelibly linked in the public imaginary” (189).Allison is fully cognizant of the ideological “plurality and complexity of nineteenth-century socialism” (114), which here encompasses Owenite communitarianism, Chartist advocacy of social revolution (as expressed in Capel Lofft’s forgotten 1839 epic poem Ernest; or, Political Regeneration), the cooperative ethos of mid-century Christian Socialism, as well as the propagandistic efforts of the 1880s revivalists. The study is organized chronologically, and each phase of the movement forms the object of one of the book’s capacious and deftly argued chapters. Lofft’s epic, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), and Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) each receives detailed exegetical attention along the way. An additional chapter on George Eliot’s engagement with the utopian socialism of Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon in Middlemarch (1871–72) demonstrates the “unpredictable ways that socialist discourse was creatively appropriated in mainstream culture” (159) during the fallow period between Christian Socialism’s obsolescence during the 1850s and the revival of the 1880s. Will Ladislaw is convincingly shown to be a Fourierist butterfly, the third of the so-called distributive passions taxonomized in Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements (1808). Lydgate’s Saint-Simonian fascinations, meanwhile, and Dorothea’s Owenite communitarian aspirations are explored, and richly contextualized, with reference to Eliot’s reading of Louis Reybaud’s Études sur les réformateurs contemporains, ou socialistes modernes (1840). Allison illuminates Eliot’s deep intellectual interest in (and qualified sympathy with) mid-century utopian socialism in unparalleled depth and detail. I also wondered whether Eliot might have meditated Edward Casaubon’s benighted search for the “Key to all Mythologies” as a parodic riposte to the “totalizing impetus” that Reybaud identifies in the writings of Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier (176). According to Reybaud, the utopian socialists “did not aspire to single science, but to all of them. . . . Never was a synthesis more comprehensive, a generalization more vast” (qtd. on 176).The chapter on Eliot sits slightly apart from the rest, but the socialism imagined in the pages of Imagining Socialism is a heterogeneous phenomenon that sidesteps the binary historiographical thinking that would “sanction the division of nineteenth-century British socialism into two episodes: rationalist/class-conscious; nostalgic/future-oriented; communitarian/statist; utilitarian/aesthetic,” behind which lies Marx’s “tendentious division of socialism into a ‘utopian’ pre-history and ‘scientific’ (i.e., Marxist) present and future” (6). Allison would also presumably want to query that other well-worn division, based on differences in strategic outlook, that places a cordon sanitaire between the supposedly sensible, grown-up “reformists” and the dangerously outlandish “revolutionaries” (such as the youthful Lofft or the mature Morris).Allison’s definition of socialism is generously (perhaps necessarily) expansive in being expressed as an imagined, not yet fully realized form of social life that unites a “virtual fellowship” of those who envision “a more just, cooperative, and beautiful world” (2). On this reading, socialism is, first and foremost, “a goal to be imagined, rather than an ideological program to be instantiated” (2). Readers who seek after specifically ideological or political consistency in order to categorize a movement might wonder whether writers and thinkers who meet these relatively capacious criteria can be retroactively grouped together as part of a single, coherent project, or whether they belong instead to a sequence of overlapping but discontinuous political formations that inhabit different and unique conjunctures. Allison is certainly mindful of the various wars of position that took place between Owenites and Chartists, for instance, or between Chartists and Christian Socialists. Competition for recruits and adherents was as much of a watchword as the mutualist goal of cooperation, even as rank-and-file membership was often porous and promiscuous in its affinities.Such questions are less significant, here, than the apparent continuities between some very differently situated figures. As Allison makes clear in his introduction, he is chiefly concerned to explore the shared “aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century” (2). Allison, one might think, begins conceptually at the fin de siècle with the longstanding critical consensus about the aesthetically-inflected character of Morris’s socialism, whose peculiar “genius looms over [socialism’s] revival” (188), and he proceeds counterintuitively to discover a series of antecedents in the political writings and utopian plans of earlier figures such as Owen and F. D. Maurice, revealing “a tradition of radical aesthetic experimentation that lies at the heart of century of British socialist activity” (2). At one moment, in searching for a suitable adjective to describe Owen’s prose style, Allison makes a delightful choice in characterizing it as “infamously flocculent” (38); where many would identify this prosaic flocculence with the utilitarian aspects of his politics, Allison instead goes to great lengths to demonstrate the “latent aesthetic character” of Owen’s socialism (37). In support of the book’s larger claim about the occluded importance of the aesthetic, Allison sets out lucid and compelling readings of the “aesthetic idea” that undergirds Owen’s “Village of Unity” (59), and his investment in a proletarian aesthetic education of humanity, as well as the “aesthetic concept” (inherited from Coleridge) that underwrites Maurice’s conceptualization of the Christian Socialist Working Men’s Associations as “an effective ‘conductor’ of the Godhead” (136–37).For Allison, then, the diverse array of thinkers assembled across the book’s five chapters are linked by their fundamental, if sometimes unacknowledged, attraction to the aesthetic and its emancipatory potential, as well as their commitment to an anti-political conception of politics (more on that anon). Despite markedly different contexts and political positions, the socialists gathered in these pages each differently “marshalled the resources of the aesthetic to subtend their anti-political ideals of communal redemption and to imagine the world otherwise”; this recovered tradition of aesthetic experimentation, made newly available through Allison’s extensive research, thereby reveals “surprising affinities between what are typically conceived as discrete, even antithetical, phases of socialist initiative” (32).In methodological terms, Allison asserts the primacy (or, if not the primacy, then certainly the under-appreciated prominence) of the aesthetic in nineteenth-century socialist thought and practice. His interest in the theoretical tradition of Western Marxism also comes into focus at various points in the book: interlocutors include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams, and Slavoj Žižek. The Victorian socialist illustrator and artist Walter Crane is another regular and welcome presence (and one of his illustrations adorns the book’s cover), but Walter Benjamin is absent. Given that the differential forms of juncture between aesthetics and politics are crucial to Allison’s persuasively revisionist argument, some reflection on Benjamin’s memorable conclusion to “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” where Benjamin reflects on the distinction between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art, might have further elucidated the stakes of an already nuanced argument.Insightfully, Allison recognizes that Morris’s “conception of the aesthetic is different in kind from that of the other socialists” encountered in the book, partly because Morris’s socialism was “self-consciously aesthetic,” which allowed him the better to articulate, or embody, a dynamic that had only been latently present throughout the movement’s earlier history (194, 190). As Allison puts it, Owen and the later Christian Socialists “drew upon the resources of the aesthetic to subtend their distinctive anti-political projects” but, crucially, “neither Owen nor Maurice and his followers appear to have grasped the extent to which their plans hinged upon aesthetic modalities” (197). By contrast, Allison cogently suggests that Morris’s “socialist aesthetic instantiates a process of desublimation” because Morris brings into the foreground of his work the very “aesthetic energies, practices and devices” that earlier socialists had merely “channeled” or “concealed” (194, 197). Allison also carefully contends that this was not an unmixed blessing. One suspects that Allison would concur that Morris, in formulating a specifically socialist aesthetic, was busily politicizing his art in a way that Benjamin would likely have approved; one also wonders, by the same token, whether the rather more latent and sublimated aesthetic character of, say, Owen’s Institute for the Formation of Character (64–70) or Maurice’s advocacy of Working Men’s Associations (136–37) might bring them closer to an unconscious aestheticization of politics—or anti-politics.Another key aspect of the book’s avowedly “revisionary argument” revolves around the “utopian aspiration” of “socialism’s ‘anti-politics’” (7). As with the movement’s aesthetic impulse, Allison argues that the “anti-political tradition . . . spans the century, revealing surprising continuities between what has hitherto seemed to be sharply distinct—and even qualitatively different—waves of socialist activity” (15). Again working backwards from a reading of Morris, specifically the chapter “Concerning Politics” in News from Nowhere (Old Hammond: “we are very well off as to politics,—because we have none”), Allison relies on Gregory Claeys and Gareth Stedman Jones to establish that socialist anti-politics was “reinforced by the culture’s deeply ingrained suspicion of centralized authority” (9), and he maintains that these anti-political proclivities are variously detectable amongst Owenites, Chartists, Christian Socialists, and the Morrisian socialists of the fin de siècle.In essence, Allison appears to identify this anti-political tradition with a generalized prioritization of social as against more narrowly political reform, the “ambition to diminish the importance of politics” (133), and scepticism about the idea that the state might be the agent of such reform (hence the emphasis on the creation of para-state institutions such as model villages or Working Men’s Associations). Socialist anti-politics runs the gamut from Marx and Engels’s anticipated “‘withering of the state’ under achieved communism” (9) to the familiar Saint-Simonian dictum, picked up by Engels, that “the ‘government of men’ would . . . be supplanted by the ‘administration of things’” in a future socialist society (10). Anti-politics, then, exists chiefly as a goal to be achieved after a far-reaching reorganization of social life along nongovernmental lines, hence its status as “utopian aspiration.” Yet Allison also astutely recognizes that “insofar as socialists understood themselves to be addressing perennial problems of governance, from the maintenance of order to the allocation of collective resources, one might argue that they failed to escape the conceptual ambit of the political” (10). Quite so. Another way of putting this might posit that liberation from politics (as narrowly conceived and practiced in bourgeois society) must necessarily go through politics, and this will entail a variety of experiments in both political strategy and imaginative speculation, which, if successful, might produce either an expanded and reconceptualized horizon for the practice of politics or its effective supersession. Again in dialogue with Claeys, Allison recognizes the ambiguity and “ambivalent potential” of anti-politics insomuch as the far-reaching, totalizing ambitions to transform the whole of society could, in fact, result in society’s “hyperpoliticization” (11), such that an ostensibly homeopathic intention might have a paradoxically toxifying effect.In a fitting epilogue, Allison concludes the book on “a note of unevenness and asymmetry,” resisting the temptation to let the “socialist century” inaugurated by Owen in 1817 find its fulfillment in the revolutionary events of 1917 (223). He instead turns his attention to the British Labour Party, specifically its adoption of a new party program, Labour and the New Social Order, drafted by the Fabian Sidney Webb and adopted in 1918, along with a new constitution that included the totemic Clause IV commitment to introduce common ownership of the means of production. For Allison, this represents not so much the culmination and full flowering of the nineteenth-century tradition surveyed in the book, but rather its effective closure and termination. Even as today’s cross-party consensus on the apparent virtues of neoliberalism and the ongoing obliteration of the post–World War II welfare state makes the 1918 document “read like a dispatch from utopia,” it simultaneously concretizes an “unthinking statism” that Allison construes as the “very antithesis of the anti-political impulse that fueled the socialists at the heart of [his] study” (239). It represents, at least for its partisans, the closure of a properly strategic debate about the means to achieve (rather than simply imagine) socialism, retrenching around a gradualist commitment to play the “parliamentary game” (239). Allison closes pointedly by calling on readers to “continue to imagine socialism” (240), and such an undertaking must surely entail the continued and continual reopening of questions that the Webbs of the world, in their vulgarian stupor, would like to think settled.