Socialism and the English middle class: the public and private worlds of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole

This project presents new insights into the political culture of Britain in the twentieth century, exploring what socialism meant to contemporaries in this period, and examining the challenges and opportunities for middle-class figures who positioned themselves within the Labour movement. G.D.H. (1889-1959) and Margaret Cole (1893-1980) - husband and wife, collaborators as writers and researchers, prominent commentators on politics, economics and society, Fabian socialists and middle-class intellectuals - were major figures in the development of the British left. They helped to shape party institutions and articulate the case for democratic socialism through their involvement in the Fabian Society, their direction of the Labour party's research department, and their educational work. Their writings on history and economics were influential across a wide readership, whilst some readers encountered them in a rather different literary guise, as writers of a series of detective novels. Their range of activities, enthusiasms and social and institutional relationships offers fruitful scope for examining the complexities of political engagement, the nature of middle-class identity, and the connections between personal and public life.
Recent approaches to the study of political history have focused less on institutional histories of political parties and narrow histories of political thought, and more on notions of political culture - the settings within which political activity took place, the forms of expression used to debate and promote political ideas, and the relationship between aspects of broader cultural experience and the parameters within which people imagined the realm of public life and service and ideological debate. The boundaries between political and non-political aspects of an individual's life often appear problematic, and this study takes that question about political identities as its starting point. The Coles met through socialism and devoted much of their lives to various forms of political activity. 'Socialism and the English middle class' re-examines the place of politics within their married life and partnership, looking at how their political beliefs affected the ways in which the Coles functioned within a variety of social contexts and relationships. It also considers the degree to which their middle-class backgrounds, tastes and lifestyle influenced their vision of socialism and working-class politics - a vision which had tremendous influence on audiences during much of the twentieth century, both within Britain and more widely.
The Coles' most recognisable legacy in the early twenty-first century lies in their writings on social and labour history, which helped to shape the historiography of radicalism and interpretations of the impact of economic development. G.D.H. Cole's political ideas have attracted renewed curiosity in recent decades, as an alternative vision of a socialist economy, based on pluralist, democratic and participatory socialism rather than the state-sponsored management which triumphed in Labour thinking after the Second World War. This study provides an opportunity to reassess the Coles' notions about socialism and their analyses of class, society and national identity. Re-examination of their significance and influence, and their role as academics, intellectuals and popularizers on a public stage, also deepens understandings about the historical role of the middle-class intelligentsia within left-wing politics, and indeed within political debate more generally. 'Socialism and the English middle class' will provide the first modern, critical biography of the Coles, using the rich resources of material from their private papers and voluminous publications to explore the context within which they set out to live a socialist life: the world which shaped them, and which they, in return, sought to reshape in a new political image.