Participatory Democracy and the British Utopian Tradition: Leonard Woolf’s Co-operative Commonwealth in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article examines an understudied chapter in the history of British socialist thought: the consumer-based socialism theorized by the Fabian and Labour Party advisor Leonard Woolf between 1913 and 1920. Exemplifying what used to be referred to in negative terms as “interwar idealism,” Woolf is now widely considered one of the chief architects of imperial and foreign policy for the British Labour Party between 1914 and 1945. Throughout this period, he was also a patient and committed advocate for a cooperative model of participatory, rank-and-file democracy founded on the organization and practices of the Co-operative Movement, whose socialist, transformative aspirations Woolf found most fully realized in the Women's Co-operative Guild under the leadership of Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Woolf's interest in radical democratic templates places him in a line of British utopian thought that looks to small-scale models of popular self-government as test cases for overall social transformation—ranging from Robert Owen's communes, through William Morris's medieval craft guilds, to the guild socialism advocated by G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney. At the same time, in identifying the consumer rather than the producer as the means and ends of social change, Woolf's proposals for a socialist commonwealth emerge as an alternative to most socialist thought, a rarely examined case in a British politics of consumption which, as Matthew Hilton has shown, has traditionally offered itself as a “middle” or “third way” solution to a party political system dominated by the interests of capitalists and workers.