G. D. H. Cole | |
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| Born | George Douglas Howard Cole (1889-09-25)25 September 1889 Cambridge, England |
| Died | 14 January 1959(1959-01-14) (aged 69) London, England |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Political party | Labour |
| Other political affiliations | Popular Front |
| Spouse | |
| Academic background | |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
| Sub-discipline | |
| School or tradition | Guild socialism |
| Institutions | |
| Notable works | A History of Socialist Thought |
| Influenced | |
| Part ofa series on |
| Libertarian socialism |
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George Douglas Howard Cole (25 September 1889 – 14 January 1959) was an Englishpolitical theorist, economist, historian, and novelist. As a believer in common ownership of the means of production, he theorisedguild socialism (production organised through worker guilds). He belonged to theFabian Society and was an advocate for theco-operative movement.
Cole was born in Cambridge to George Cole, a jeweller who later became a surveyor; and his wife Jessie Knowles.[2]
Cole was educated atSt Paul's School andBalliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a First inClassical Moderations in 1910 and a First inLiterae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1912.[3][2]
In the autumn of 1912 Cole accepted a post as lecturer in philosophy atArmstrong College,Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[4]: 47 Conditions were far from ideal, since Cole's students were mainly students studying technical subjects who attended his lectures merely because they were compulsory.[4]: 47 In the same year, however, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship atMagdalen College, Oxford, which ran for seven years; he had an annual income of several hundred pounds and no obligation to teach. He could research and write.[4]: 48
Cole, personally a pacifist, took a pragmatic approach to the 1914-18 war.[5]: 39 In 1915, however, he became an unpaid research officer at theAmalgamated Society of Engineers. He advised the union on how to respond to wartime legislation including theMunitions of War Act 1915. This role enabled him to escapeconscription on the grounds that he was conducting work of national importance.
Cole's involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker,Margaret Postgate, whom he married in 1918.
Having secured exemption from military service, Cole was practically active first with his union work and with journalism in defence of workers' rights;[4]: 61–73 he also found time to develop a political theory ofguild socialism.[2] which had first engaged his attention during his undergraduate years.[5]: 49ff
Cole's Prize Fellowship ended in 1919. He needed employment. He moved to London. His first job, provided byArthur Henderson, was as part-time secretary to the Advisory Committees which had been established by the Labour Party in 1918 to create a clear and comprehensive political programme, a programme for a full-fledged political party and not a pressure group. The work was congenial and satisfactory but the requirements of the job proved too much for Cole's part-time commitment.[citation needed]
He then secured a job with theManchester Guardian as its Labour Correspondent. He did not stay with the paper for long. His wife commented:
he was not really at all fitted to be a regular journalist on a daily. Though his contributions were well informed and generally readable, and though, so far as my knowledge goes, their accuracy went unchallenged, he was quite incapable of giving to theGuardian that priority of service and attention which any good newspaperman must give to his paper; and I very clearly recollect the amazed exasperation displayed on more than one occasion by the London Editor, or the Night Editor as the case might be, when a piece of news requiring instant comment had turned up, and their Labour Correspondent was not available on the telephone, had gone out, nobody knew where, or for how long[4]: 105
Cole authored several economic and historical works including biographies ofWilliam Cobbett andRobert Owen.
In 1925, he became reader in economics atUniversity College, Oxford.
In 1929, he was appointed to theNational Economic Advisory Council when it was set up by thesecond Labour government. In 1944, Cole became the firstChichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was succeeded in the chair byIsaiah Berlin in 1957.[2]
Cole's pacifism of 1914-18 was abandoned by 1940 when he said: "Hitler cured me of pacifism".[6]: 84 During the 1930s, Cole sought to construct a British popular front againstfascism. He identified the extent of the military threat before many of his colleagues had abandoned their pacifism. Cole lent strong support to therepublican cause in theSpanish Civil War.[2]
He was listed inNazi Germany'sBlack Book of prominent subjects to be arrested in the case of a successfulinvasion of Britain.[7]
In 1941, Cole was appointed sub-warden ofNuffield College, Oxford. He was central to the establishment of the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey which collected a large amount of demographic, economic and social data. This information was used to advocate for an extensive programme of social reform.[2]
Cole became interested inFabianism while studying atBalliol College, Oxford. He joined theFabian Society's executive under the sponsorship ofSidney Webb. Cole became a principal proponent ofguild socialist ideas, alibertarian socialist alternative toMarxianpolitical economy. These ideas he put forward inThe New Age before and during theFirst World War and also in the pages ofThe New Statesman, the weekly founded by theBeatrice Webb andGeorge Bernard Shaw.
Cole said his interest in socialism was kindled by his readingNews from Nowhere, theutopian novel byWilliam Morris, writing:
I became a Socialist because, as soon as the case for a society of equals, set free from the twin evils of riches and poverty, mastership and subjection, was put to me, I knew that to be the only kind of society that could be consistent with human decency and fellowship and that in no other society could I have the right to be content.
— World Socialism Restated[8]
Neither aMarxist nor asocial democrat, Cole envisioned aguild socialism of decentralised association and active,participatory democracy, whose basic units would be sited at the workplace and in the community rather than in any central apparatus of the state. Cole criticized bothstate socialism andsyndicalism as leaving open the possibility of tyranny, and envisioned a form of socialism where all enterprises would be democratically run by the workers through trade unions with the state remaining to guarantee consumers' rights andcivil liberties. Cole's ideas were influential in intellectual circles but were generally dismissed byLabour Party leaders such asRamsay MacDonald.[9][10]
In the 1920s,Hugh Gaitskell, a student of Cole, became active supporter of the1926 United Kingdom general strike.[11] Cole also was a powerful influence on the life of the youngHarold Wilson, whom he taught, worked with and convinced to join theLabour Party.
Cole formed the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda to advance his views, which combined with former members of theIndependent Labour Party defecting to the mainstream Labour Party after its disaffiliation to form theSocialist League in 1932.[12] In 1936, Cole began calling for apopular front movement in Britain in which theLabour Party would ally with otherpolitical parties againstappeasement and the threat of fascism.[13]
Cole wrote at least seven books for theLeft Book Club, all of which were published byVictor Gollancz Ltd. They are marked with LBC in the list of his books given below. He and his wife,Margaret Cole, together wrote 29 popular detective stories,[14] featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr. Tancred. Cole and his wife created a partnership but not a marriage. Cole took little interest in sex and he regarded women as a distraction for men. Margaret documented this comprehensively in a biography she wrote of her husband after his death.[15]
Although Cole admired theSoviet Union for creating asocialist economy, he rejected itsdictatorial government as a model for socialist societies elsewhere. In a 1939 lecture, Cole stated:
If I do not acceptStalin's answer, it is because I am not prepared to write offDemocratic Socialism, despite all its failures and vacillations of recent years, as a total loss.... Democratic Socialism offers the only means of building the new order on what is valuable and worth preserving in the civilisation of to-day.[16]
In his bookEurope, Russia and the Future published in 1941, Cole claimed that however immoral the newNazi-dominated Europe was in some ways it was better than the "impracticable" system ofsovereign states that had preceded it. In economic terms, it could be said that "it would be better to letHitler conquer allEurope short of the Soviet Union, and thereafter exploit it ruthlessly in theNazi interest, than to go back to the pre-war order of independentNation States with frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the natural units of production and exchange".[17] Cole also stated:
I would much sooner see the Soviet Union, even with its policy unchanged, dominant over all Europe, including Great Britain, than see an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their pettyeconomic nationalism under capitalist domination. Much better be ruled by Stalin than by the destructive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism.[18]
Cole was also a theorist of theco-operative movement and made a number of contributions to the fields ofco-operative studies,co-operative economics and thehistory of the co-operative movement. In particular, his bookThe British Co-operative Movement in a Socialist Society examined the economic status of the English CWS (the predecessor of the modernCo-operative Group), evaluated its possibility of achieving aCo-operative Commonwealth without state assistance and hypothesised what the role the co-operative might have in asocialist state.[19]
A second book, titledA Century of Co-operation, examined the history of the movement from the very first co-operatives to the contribution of theChartists andRobert Owen, through to theRochdale Pioneers as well as the movement's development (in Great Britain) over the following century.[20]
Cole contributed toAn Outline of Modern Knowledge, ed. William Rose (Victor Gollancz, 1931) along with other leading authorities of the time, includingRoger Fry,C. G. Seligman,Maurice Dobb andF. J. C. Hearnshaw.
In August 1918, Cole marriedMargaret Isabel Postgate (1893–1980). Margaret was the daughter of the classical scholarJohn Percival Postgate.[2]
The couple had one son and two daughters in a marriage that lasted forty-one years. However, the marriage does not seem to have been especially happy. Cole expressed little interest in actual romantic attachment and even less in sexual relations. Friends observed that emotional attachments tended to be with men rather than women. Cole was very fond of some of his male students. They included the future leader of the Labour PartyHugh Gaitskell. There is no evidence of any homosexual encounters either before or during his marriage.[2]
Cole and his wife jointly wrote a number of books and articles, including twenty-nine detective stories.[2]
Cole could not accept the idea of a "determinate human superior". His wife recalled that "he... never gave orders except in a purely routine and non-significant sense".[4]: 35 His dislike of all forms of hierarchy and hatred of ritual led toatheism at an early age, though he never engaged in anti-religiouspolemics.[4]: 143 While noluddite, he greatly admired everything produced byWilliam Morris including his affection for theCotswolds. Though he enjoyedclassical music, he regarded the radio as making a horrible noise[4]: 47 Almost allergic tohigher mathematics (he did not understandAlgebra) he distrustedscience, as he believed it was being used to quantify things that were best left to interpretation.[4]: 34
In literature and poetry he enjoyed (after Morris)Defoe,Swift,William Wordsworth,Walt Whitman,Henry James,William Cobbett,Bertrand Russell,George Bernard Shaw andSamuel Butler, but he foundEdmund Burke andThomas Carlyle pretentious. He disliked the "imperialism" ofShakespeare and hatedD. H. Lawrence.[4]: 38
He was admired by his students, but Gaitskell said he was much too sensitive, self-critical and sardonic to play the part of the master at all willingly.[4]: 144
In the spring of 1929 the Coles returned to London, living inWest Hampstead for six years until buying a "rambling Victorian" house called "Freeland" inHendon where he lived for most of the last three decades of his life.[4]: 171–173 In early 1957 he and his wife moved to a flat inHolland Park,Kensington.[21] He died after going into adiabetic coma in the early hours of 14 January 1959 in hospital inHampstead.[22] In lieu of religious rites his brother-in-law,Raymond Postgate, read two passages from the works ofWilliam Morris at his funeral inGolders Green Crematorium.[23] His estate was offered forprobate at £46,617 (equivalent to £1,097,364 in 2020).[21][24]
| Party political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Chairman of theNew Fabian Research Bureau 1937–1939 | Office abolished |
| New office | Chairman of theFabian Society 1937–1946 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Chairman of theFabian Society 1948–1950 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | President of theFabian Society 1952–1959 | Succeeded by |
| Academic offices | ||
| New office | Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory 1944–1957 | Succeeded by |
