Abstract

The Labour Party politician Anthony Crosland made a significant contribution to social democratic theory, particularly through his book The Future of Socialism, which was first published in 1956. At the time, Crosland's major work was regarded as emblematic of Labour's 'revisionist' accommodation to post-war realities, and it enjoyed a substantial impact on the policies and political philosophy of the Gaitskell wing of the Party. The book's distinctive combination of egalitarian values, market economics, and gradualist politics had a discernible impact on labour movement debates on welfare policy, nationalisation, and long-range social democratic goals. Yet the book was also animated by a rejection of British complacency and a sympathy for consumer and youth cultures, and the right to private enjoyment. One feature of the book that is often overlooked is its effort to contribute to a post-war Anglo-American progressive dialogue that has all but disappeared from view.

I.

The notion of the British welfare state as a humanitarian achievement - as 'a striking instance of a successful experiment in liberal philosophy'1- has taken something of a beating in recent years. Yet there was a time, in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, when the term 'welfare state' could be used to evoke not only a heterogeneous ensemble of public policies but a systematic approach to organizing complex industrial societies. Many writers could argue (or more often assume) that through the agency of the welfare state capitalism had been 'reformed almost out of existence', as Anthony Crosland put it, and that, in 'moving from a subsistence to an abundant society', 2 Britain was negotiating a middle path between capitalism and socialism, one that would harness market forces to the dictates of a redistributive social democratic egalitarianism.

This positive social conception of the welfare state, which was simultaneously extended to its politico-economic analogue, the mixed economy, had its critics, of course. F.A. Hayek on the Right, and, say, Cornelius Castoriadis on the Left, denounced the post-war compact in no uncertain terms.3 But these Continental contrarians were marginalised in the face of the Butskellite consensus. Critics of the welfare state despaired of disturbing the slumber of politicians, civil servants, and voters who appeared indifferent to the costs of collectivism's vaunting ambitions. It was only with the protracted downturn of the 1970s, and the movement toward globalism in the 1980s, that the basis for a national redistributive economy was effectively undermined. The writings of Hayek, if not Castoriadis, circulated in far greater numbers and were credited with setting the stage for a post-dependency Britain that could adopt the mores of an enterprise culture.4

The idea The idea that post-war Britain had, or could in the near future resolve the dilemmas of market economics took hold not only among Britons but liberal and progressive Americans as well. The British welfare state symbolised what could be achieved through an alliance of blue collar workers, professionals, and state planners. During the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign, for example, Michael Dukakis revealed that one of the seminal influences on his development was a senior honours course he had taken at Swarthmore College on the welfare state - the British welfare state - in which he absorbed the work of Tawney, Laski, Strachey, and quite possibly Crosland. Dukakis' election-year mantra, 'good jobs at good wages', represented a cautious effort to package the high-wage, high-tech, high-tax 'Massachusetts model' in terms that an anti-Communist electorate could understand. His defeat at the hands of George Bush was subsequently interpreted as the death knell for Democratic Party reformism, with its fatal dependence on the unions, liberal interest groups, and the welfare bureaucracy.

Dukakis notwithstanding, the last sustained articulation of this identification of progressive politics with post-war Britain could be found in a book by Washington Post correspondent Bernard Nossiter: Britain: A Future that Works (1978). Writing on the eve of the Winter of Discontent, Nossiter offered a sanguine portrait of a country that had effected the transition to post-industrialism without sacrificing its democratic system or distinctive cultural values. Although he did not mention Crosland by name, the terms of his analysis were clearly informed by Croslandite themes. 'Far from being sick', Nossiter wrote,

the place is healthy, democratic, productive, as stable a society as any of its size in Europe. It is transforming the heritage of the Industrial Revolution, shedding the plants, the mills and some of the values that made them work. It is slowly becoming a post-industrial society where a decreasing number of men and women are concerned with the production of goods and an increasing share with things of the mind and spirit - or services, in the economists' accounting...As rich societies insist on more satisfying work, they are likely to reflect on Britain. Then, instead of serving as a warning, Britain will teach a lesson, serve as a model of sorts in tomorrow's world.5

Nossiter recognised that his adopted homeland was plagued by social and economic difficulties. 'With an inflation rate above its industrial homologues', he mourned,'an unemployment level close to the highest tides elsewhere in the West, with growing hostility between jobless whites and black and brown immigrants, Britain is hardly the New Jerusalem'. Nossiter nevertheless insisted that the fundamental structures of the post-war order were sound and would remain intact. Britain was by no means the 'sinking, chaotic, miserable swamp of the more imaginative journalists and professors'.6 In particular, he rejected the notion that Britain was on the verge of a 'backlash':

Eric Sevareid startled a sizeable CBS television audience in May 1975 by revealing that "Britain is drifting slowly towards a condition of ungovernability". He compared Wilson's regime to that of Salvador Allende in Chile on the eve of Admiral Pinochet's coup. "Not that the backlash in Britain need be militaristic". Sevareid hastened to assure his listeners, "but some kind of backlash is building up". Sevareid promised to report on its policy and leader as soon as he could find them.7

Whil this passage was intended as sarcastic, the effort fell flat. From the vantage point of nearly two decades of Conservative rule, Sevareid's assessment appears rather more persuasive than Nossiter's. While Nossiter may have been justified in supposing that the welfare state retained support among the general public, he seemed oblivious to the substantive challenge posed by rightist (and leftist) critics of post-war Britain's troubled economic performance.

Adversaries of the post-war order were amply represented in The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain (1977), an edited work that brought together English and American neo-conservatives in an effort to explain (and hasten) the rise and fall of post-war collectivism. In his chapter on the role of intellectuals in the making of the welfare state, Colin Welsh argued that the industrial militants of the 1970s were inspired by the writings of 1950s-style social democrats:

And if I pay a lot of attention to comparatively dull dogs like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Strachey, R.H. Tawney, and Anthony Crosland, this is not because I think them more amusing than their wilder sidekicks but because I am sure they and their innumerable followers have had more influence...Britain is still governed by them, perhaps increasingly so. They are still the brains of the ruling Labour Party; they have supplied its dominant prejudices and reflexes as well as the broad mass of its reasoning. Some oaf shrieks 'Shoot the Bosses!' or 'Make the rich squeal!' It appears to come from the natural prompting of an embittered and unlettered heart. Yet dimly behind such outbursts we are aware of the prompting and blessing of some remote grey ideologue, half forgotten yet still potent.8

Welsh took particular care to deconstruct the writings of Anthony Crosland, whose urbane manner masked a destructive egalitarian fervour. Welsh blasted Crosland for interfering with the education system and tampering with the laws of market economics. He was particularly incensed by Crosland's argument on behalf of relatively high levels of taxation, which Crosland saw as a useful means of redistributing wealth and correcting market-generated inefficiencies. For Welsh, Crosland's pro-growth, pro-taxation policies led directly to the inflationary pressures of the 1970s:

In The Future of Socialism, written in 1956, Mr. Crosland declared that full employment could be easily achieved and maintained by judicious and timely expansion of domestic demand, that is, by that 'continuing mild inflation' that he and other moderates consider tolerable or even beneficial. He ignored the likelihood that inflation, in order to perform the beneficent task he allotted to it, must be less and less mild, more and more rapid and progressive, always a bit more than expected; for 'expected' inflation is discounted in advance and produces no effect on demand. Hence in part our present difficulties, with an unprecedented inflation rate and rising unemployment.9

The Discussion concerning the 'threat of inflation' was intended to assist policy-makers in keeping inflation in check without asphyxiating the growth that made the welfare state possible. Part of the answer to subduing inflation, Crosland suggested, lay in ensuring that consumers and investors enjoyed access to stable sources of savings. He also made passing reference to the inflationary dangers posed by 'an excessively popular Budget'.13 If Crosland was not as inflation-phobic as Welsh would have liked, his position was closer to the neo-classical mainstream than his detractor might have cared to admit.

II.

As these references suggest, the impact of Crosland's 'growth-oriented social democracy'14 was registered at the very core of trans-Atlantic controversies over the meaning and durability of the British post-war order. The Future of Socialism in particular became emblematic of Labour's 'revisionist' accommodation to 'post-war realities', much in the way that the 1959 Bad Godesburg conference came to represent the West German SPD's embrace of the Sozialemarktwirtschaft. After Crosland, the Labour Party was no longer a reformist party with socialist aspirations, but a social democratic party with radical aspirations. Because of its intimate connection with post-war preoccupations and ambitions, however, the book barely registers in the contemporary academic literature on democratic socialism and social democracy,15 and has failed to attract the degree of interest accorded, say, Andrew Shonfield's Modern Capitalism (1960), or Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944). Many readers may simply assume that the lacuna and political naivete of the post-war labourite project are faithfully reproduced in Crosland's text - from a myopia about the coherence of 'class' as a constitutive social category, to an indifference to environmental and feminist concerns, to an untenable optimism about the co-ordinating functions of the post-war state and the prospects for uninterrupted economic growth. The title itself may strike some readers as slightly off-kilter, given that 'socialism' (evolutionary or revolutionary) has a more certain past than future.

Yet for anyone versed in post-war British politics, The Future of Socialism is a vintage, even canonical text. The book's appealing synthesis of gradualism and egalitarianism found an appreciative audience among social democrats, even as it antagonised successive generations of conservatives and anti-market socialists.16 At the relatively youthful age of thirty-eight, Crosland produced an insightful, 'exhilarating'17 work that took advantage of top-drawer social science and reshaped the terms of Labour movement debate around such issues as welfare policy, public ownership, and long-range social democratic goals. The impact of Crosland's ideas was felt most immediately on Labour Party policy under the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, and the Party's 1959 manifesto appropriated Croslandite language and proposals.18

Crosland was by no means the first to define the ambitions of a moderate social democracy. Such authors as E.F.M. Durbin, Douglas Jay, and Hugh Dalton (not to mention Henri deMan and Eduard Bernstein) had already delved into the politics and political philosophy of welfare-minded democratic socialism. But Crosland's 'ingenious formulations'19 lent theoretical heft to labourite revisionism and invigorated the cause of pro-growth social democracy. As one Labour strategist suggested, it is 'difficult to recall the impact' which the book 'made when it first appeared'. This strategist went on to argue that to 'a shaming extent, the Labour Party (or at least its moderate wing) has been living off the intellectual capital of The Future of Socialism ever since, and many of its concepts have become such common coinage that few of those who trade in them are aware of their origin'.20

At the very least, Crosland's text offered something more specific than a Fabian-style renunciation of violence and an emphasis on public spending and parliamentary institutions. From Crosland's perspective, radical politics required jettisoning many socialist objectives in light of the fact that 'traditional pre-1914 capitalism' had been superseded by an imperfect arrangement that the author declined to name but that clearly resembled something akin to the democratic welfare state.

Three aspects of Crosland's argument stand out in particular. First, Crosland endorsed the principle of economic growth and sought to identify measures that would enhance the dynamism of the private sector. He wrote of the 'manifest indispensability' of profit-making enterprises, which provided goods and services with an efficiency that the state could hardly be expected to duplicate. Socialists should 'welcome' profit-making, and encourage the fullest possible level of market activity, but also seek to redress socially-harmful imbalances in private wealth through taxation on profits and dividends. His long-range economic ideal consisted of a 'diverse, diffused, pluralist, and heterogeneous pattern of ownership'. But since this ideal was 'still a long way off, we need heavy taxation to limit profits and dividends. And it may be an unpopular solution amongst the traditionalists of the Left, who still want (or will be made to want by ad captandum speeches) the steady creation of State monopolies'.21

Second, Crosland rejected the Labour movement's emphasis on public ownership as a means of asserting socialist control over of the economy. While he accepted that public ownership was potentially justifiable in circumstances where 'a genuine economic case can be made out',22 he was critical of state monopolies and instead favoured 'competitive public enterprises' that 'involve less danger of bureaucracy and Whitehall control....[and] can be justified on strict commercial grounds'. 23

Fianlly, he regarded the attainment of greater levels of social equality as the highest aspiration of socialist politics. The pursuit of greater equality required a reform program centred around social services and fiscal policy - the education system, the tax structure, and the welfare system - as well as what Crosland termed the 'pattern of consumption'. A more equitable system of public education, along with a radical overhaul of the tax code and broader access to consumer goods, would point the way to a more equitable society.

Crosland's approach differed from that of many socialists. He had little use for the doctrine of parliamentary class struggle or for the proposition that it was necessary to organise the vanguard of the working class to effect a revolutionary rupture with capitalism. Instead of trumpeting the virtues of fraternity and class based solidarity, he spoke in favour of higher levels of consumption, investment in infrastructure, the relief of hardship, and export surpluses.

Yet one of the notable features of Crosland's analysis was its peculiar combination of economic revisionism and social radicalism. Crosland rejected the left's emphasis on public ownership, and its reliance on Marxian categories of economic analysis, but proposed a program of egalitarian reform that went further than anything on offer from other members of the circle around the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, the so-called 'Frognal set'. While many readers may remember that Crosland argued firmly in favour of economic growth, private initiative, and the mixed economy, they may have forgotten the severity of Crosland's reformist agenda, as evidenced by his call for limits on stock dividends, for steep taxes on inherited wealth, gifts, and capital gains, and his complaint against 'the excesses of competitive individualism'.24

We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure-gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women's clothes, statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum.27

This was part of a sustained assault on the Labour movement's 'Puritanism', which Crosland traced back to Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other well-intentioned Fabians:

To-day we are all incipient bureaucrats and practical administrators. We have all, so to speak, been trained at the L.S.E., are familiar with Blue Books and White Papers, and know our way around Whitehall. We realise that we must guard against romantic or Utopian notions: that hard work and research are virtues: that we must do nothing foolish or impulsive: and that Fabian pamphlets must be diligently studied. We know these things too well. Posthumously, the Webbs have won their battle, and converted a generation to their standards. Now the time has come for a reaction: for a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent, on culture, beauty, leisure, and even frivolity. Total abstinence and a good filing-system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia: or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.28

These passages suggest that Crosland's approach had more in common with the socialist-humanism of the early New Left, as articulated by such writers as Raymond Williams, Norman Birnbaum, and Stuart Hall, than his erstwhile political allies might have supposed. While Crosland was careful to distinguish between his views and those of the New Left, he also acknowledged that he shared much of their cultural critique. In The Conservative Enemy (1962), after lambasting Raymond Williams for failing to grasp elementary economic principles, Crosland admitted that he too found Britain to be 'extremely backward in certain respects', complaining that the 'national mood is one of conservatism, antipathy to innovation, an absence of audacity, and an unwarranted complacency with things as they are'.29 Indeed, some of his leftist critics may have been disconcerted to find Crosland reminding socialists that they have 'anarchist blood' in their veins, as he did in The Future of Socialism.30

III.

It may be easier to recognise the diversity of the ideological strands that help make up The Future of Socialism than when the book was first published, when it was read in the context of Labour movement debates over nationalisation, defence, nuclear policy, and Clause IV. While the dominant tone of the book is social democratic, in that it espouses a gradualist approach to economic and social policy in the interests of enhancing the condition of the broad masses of people, there is also a more radical inflection in the discussions about social equality and personal liberty. Moreover, the book is animated by a rhetoric of modernisation that was at odds with more conventional social democratic conceptions. Crosland's interest in a more 'modern' Britain is defended in its own right and is not merely a rhetorical extension of his social democratic commitments, although much of the book represents an attempt to connect the two themes in a manner that could appeal to a broad swathe of public opinion.

The book is also informed by a kind of small-'l' liberalism that helped inoculate the text against the creeping statism that informed a great deal of post-war social democratic theorising. All of this ideological cross-fertilisation begins to make Crosland look like one of Richard Rorty's 'post-modern liberals' - tentative in making assumptions, drawn to diverse sources and texts, reluctant to affix too firmly to any single ideological label, sceptical of blueprints for reorganising society, and willing to acknowledge personal frailties, limitations, and blinders. Few books written by British socialists are likely to contain as many caveats, admissions of lack of expertise, and phrases such as 'in my opinion' and 'in my view'. This self-effacing style is undoubtedly connected to Crosland's own complex personality. One of his colleagues noted that he was 'an intensely private man, surprisingly shy for somebody who had revelled in an extrovert reputation'.31 In her biography, Susan Crosland describes her late husband as guarded in his political relations, open to new experiences and different points of view in his private life, and exceptionally ambivalent about everyday political duties.32

As is the case with much of Crosland's writing, The Future of Socialism is profoundly conditioned by a critical dialogue with Marx's theories. Crosland set out to vanquish 1930s-style Marxism in the opening chapters of The Future of Socialism, but he later acknowledged the emergence of a more sophisticated neo-Marxism. In his final work, he took note of the deterioration of the welfare state and asked if 'these setbacks to our hopes demonstrate that the revisionist analysis of means and ends was wrong, and the Marxist analysis which it sought to rebut is right?' 33 His answer was that Marxism continued to suffer from a rigid theory of crisis, and underestimated the sociological complexity of welfare-oriented societies. But he admitted that the perspective with which he had been identified had been lazily sanguine about the prospects for growth and the pressure for progressive reform. In particular he recognised that he had been excessively optimistic about the capacity of the economy to sustain post-war levels of growth. 'Were I completely revising the book', he wrote in the introduction to the second edition of The Future of Socialism,

I should substantially alter only one major argument, that relating to economic growth. Here I was too optimistic - not about the capabilities of the full-employment mixed economy...but about the Anglo-Saxon economies in particular. These have put up a lamentable performance in recent years; and the decline in their growth-rates, and the re-emergence of unused resources, would compel me now to modify (though only in an Anglo-American context) some of my remarks about economic planning, investment-attitudes, the danger of inflation, the disappearance of poverty, and the shift of power to the unions...34

It was in the context of the critique of Marxism offered in The Future of Socialism that Crosland advanced his most controversial argument, that Britain had transcended the boundaries of pre-war capitalism. For Crosland, pre-1939 Marxism had offered four postulates, each of which could be refuted by reference to post-war experiences. First, Marxists had predicted that the contradictions of capitalism would generate widespread poverty and, sooner or later, 'the collapse of the whole system'. 35 Second, Marxists regarded business elites as a 'capitalist ruling-class which held all or most of the important levers of power'.36 Third, Marxists rejected the idea that the state could become an autonomous economic actor which could modulate or challenge the influence of business elites. Finally, Marxists assumed that the employer class was dominant in the workplace and would remain so until the day the workers rose up in revolt.

Writing from the vantage point of the economic boom, Crosland rejected each of these postulates in turn. Far from having collapsed, the market economy was functioning relatively smoothly, and working class incomes were rising, not falling. The 'simple orders for a backs-to-the-wall defence must be countermanded, and replaced by a more elaborate but less exciting plan', Crosland wryly insisted.37

Furthermore, the pre-war capitalist class had given way, not to the proletariat, but to a new era of co-operation in which civic-minded state officials, rather than private sector employers, were dominant. For the most part, business elites seemed willing to cede the bulk of their political power to public institutions. The 'location of power' had shifted in the wake of war-time planning measures and the achievements of the Attlee government, and the 'business world' had lost 'much of its ideological attachment to laisser-faire, and certainly has no desire to go back to the 1930s'.38 The decline in the political power of business elites was accompanied by both a stronger state apparatus and by significant gains in working class power. Power relations within industry had also undergone significant changes: yesterday's 'capitalists' had been transformed into 'managers'. The new management class operated within a very different environment from that of pre-war capitalism. Businessmen had to work in collaboration with workers, unions, state actors, as well as managers in allied fields. In short, Marxist images of class conflict and capitalist contradictions had become hopelessly outdated. Crosland could only imagine good times ahead: declining levels of poverty, reduced levels of inequality, and continued full employment.

Crosland's approach rested on what was even at that point a risky (and now plainly untenable) assumption - that the policies and habits of the welfare state were irreversible. In light of the Thatcher revolution, Crosland's discussion concerning 'The Danger of Conservative Reaction' seems myopic indeed. The post-war order, he argued, could not be substantially reversed by any government, 'for its causes lie much less in legislation, than in changes in social psychology, the moral consensus of opinion, technology, and the internal structure of industry'. In addition, the Conservative Party 'lacks the essential attribute of a counter-revolutionary party - a faith, a dogma, even a theory'. And even assuming that the Tories were interested in undoing the post-war settlement, the 'mood of the electorate provides, in any event, a sufficient guarantee against sweeping counter-revolution'. Crosland acknowledged that the Conservatives 'will continue to make dents in the new social and economic structure...as much as they dare', but he insisted that 'they will certainly not destroy the essential fabric'.39

The Canadian political scientist Leo Panitch had little difficulty in pulling Crosland's arguments apart by their threads.

How did he get it so wrong? He was convinced there wouldn't be a counter-revolution for two reasons...The first was that the Tories are wets, in Thatcher's terms. That is, the Conservatives are cautious, realistic Peelites - lacking a faith, a dogma, a theory - precisely what Thatcher went about changing. And the second reason was electoral: the mood of the electorate would not allow a counter-revolution against social democratic positions...Why did it all fall apart? By the 1980s, Crosland looked so out of touch with reality because of the reappearance of capitalist crises. These crises derived in part from the squeeze on profits resulting from the strength of the working class under full employment. This was one of the factors that lead to inflationary crises within capitalism and to a Tory reaction. He got it wrong because he so misunderstood where the British working class was going in terms of class antagonism. Writing in 1955, he had no sense of the shop-steward militant working class industrial revolt, which had very little socialist consciousness to it. There was a lot of class antagonism in Britain, which produced some of the Tory reaction, but it derived its militancy from a fully employed, affluent working class, rather than from class-conscious ideology. And he got it wrong because he misunderstood the nature of market forces in a capitalist economy. So, if Crosland was wrong, was Marx right?40

IV.

There is a substantial gap between the reputation of The Future of Socialism and its actual content. Although the book is the product of a rather optimistic historical juncture, it offers much more than a simple reformulation of revisionist principles. On such issues as inflation and unemployment, personal liberty, long-range socialist goals, and Labour movement 'Puritanism', Crosland's vision defied straightforward left-right demarcations. The limits of Crosland's approach had more to do with his unsustainable expectations concerning post-war growth and the alleged transformation of capitalism through the aegis of the welfare state than with his adherence to a supposedly rigid social democratic praxis. To the degree that The Future of Socialism is considered an emblematic text of a revisionist post-war order, the intellectual sources of that order are rather more inventive and idiosyncratic than is sometimes suggested.

There is another dimension to the book that has been alluded to here. That is, the book can be viewed not only in the context of Labour movement debates, post-war expectations, and so on, but also in terms of its contribution to a once-vital Anglo-American progressive dialogue. Such a dialogue may now seem implausible, given the gulf between Yankee individualism and post-war social democratic ideals. For this reason, it is difficult to imagine that a serious egalitarian like Crosland would address himself to American readers or find inspiration in American realities. Instead, he would be expected to look to West Germany and Scandinavia for models and prospective co-thinkers.

Yet even the book's first edition, which was aimed exclusively at the domestic market, contains many more references to U.S. authors and examples than to European cases and texts. The book is filled not only with references to historians and sociologists like Henry Steele Commager, David Riesman, Robert Merton, and William H. Whyte (and to a private correspondence with Seymour Martin Lipset), but to various aspects of American popular culture as well. The second edition, produced in 1964, was shortened and streamlined for an American readership.41

In view of the sweeping changes that have taken place in the dissemination of ideas and values across the Atlantic, it is worth emphasising that The Future of Socialism expected to contribute to an Anglo-American reformism that not only could engage in a dialogue on the basis of shared premises, but could expect to have a tangible impact on policy-making in both countries. Crosland, then, was addressing himself to influential liberals who enjoyed access to policy-makers in Congress and (with the election of John Kennedy) the executive branch. Furthermore, Crosland could take for granted the notion that educated Americans would be sympathetic to the British welfare state, and would accept the premise that Labour was a vital element of the movement for reform in the modern world. Just as right-wing radicals of the 1980s looked to the example of Margaret Thatcher for inspiration and guidance, Crosland supposed that the progressive liberals of the 1950s would look to the Labour Party for ideas and policies.

From the standpoint of the far left, Crosland's identification with an Anglo-American progressive dialogue was part of the problem, of course. The U.S. could just as plausibly be construed as a global policeman as a bastion of domestic social equality. The revisionist camp in general was criticised for glossing over the seamier aspects of American society, and ten years later the Vietnam War would place a major obstacle in the way of any kind of Anglo-American conversation that rested on progressive premises. Whether the basis for a humanistic, egalitarian Anglo-American dialogue exists in the present period remains to be seen.

Notes and references