Edward Carpenter, Ethical Socialism and the Formation of Labour’s Identity

This paper aims to make a contribution to the intellectual history of social egalitarian democratic theory and to show its influence on the British Labour Party. It does so by reconstructing ethical socialism’s democratic theory, as expressed by Edward Carpenter (1844‐1929), ethical socialism’s most prominent exponent, and tracing Carpenter’s influence on Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister. The paper argues that Carpenter’s distinct contribution to the Labour Party’s ideas about democracy, and to social egalitarian theories of democracy more broadly, was his attempt to reconcile an ethical vision of democracy with support for representative government. This paper recovers the importance of ethical socialism and sexual liberation for the development of democratic theory on the British Left, and for the shaping of the Labour Party’s conception of its role as a socialist party in a mass democracy during its rise to prominence.