I

In September 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith encountered British Labour Party MP Richard Crossman at a conference hall in Milan, Italy. They went there with a clear mission: to defend their parties’ achievements from expected attacks by Friedrich Hayek and other “reactionaries” at the conference. In public, they confidently boasted about the records of the Democratic and Labour governments in prosperity, full employment, and social and welfare programs during the past decades. In private talks, however, they were less confident—and more candid. “Both the American liberal and the British socialist in the 1930s,” said Galbraith to Crossman, “assumed that capitalism was not only immoral but unworkable; it was a system which must destroy itself because of its own inherent weaknesses.” But if this assumption were not true, he asked, “would that not mean the snapping of the mainspring of the Labour Party?” Crossman instantly got the point. The clothes of American liberals were “stolen by the Eisenhower Republicans, just as ours [were] by the Butlerites,” confessed the Labour MP. The task of reforming capitalism, which had been the raison d’être of the “party of reform” of both countries, lost its urgency. An era of reform had been replaced by an era of moderation. And in this new era, their parties were clearly on the losing side—and would continue to lose until they could find a new cause to fight.Footnote ¹

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, American liberals like Galbraith and British socialists like Crossman became more and more aware of the coming of what they called “the post-capitalist society.” According to them, reforming capitalism was the historic task of the New Deal and Fabian socialism—either to rescue capitalism from its self-destructive tendency or to destroy it through piecemeal and peaceful changes. This task, however, was seemingly becoming less imperative in the postwar era. The “long boom” and the creation of the welfare state ameliorated a range of age-old problems in their countries—among them poverty, economic insecurity, and disparity in income distribution.Footnote ² While witnessing the New Deal and Fair Deal, British socialists had come to admit that the “planned welfare capitalism” was workable and would last a long time.Footnote ³ As their system seemed more durable, the defenders of capitalism saw socialism as more acceptable. By the late 1940s, not a few American liberals found “a democratic socialism suited to the Western European and American peoples” in the Clement Attlee government's creation of the welfare state “for all citizens from cradle to grave.”Footnote ⁴ The message of these developments was clear on both sides of the Atlantic: capitalism was reformed; so was socialism. Apparently, their historic task of reforming capitalism was drawing to an end with measurable successes.Footnote ⁵

For these liberals and socialists, however, the post-capitalist society was more a curse than a blessing. The Labour and the Democratic Parties lost power one after another in the early 1950s, and neither regained it for the rest of the decade. Through the opposition years, the parties fell deeper and deeper into a quagmire of intra-party squabbling, with a lack of clear destination in the face of their conservative rivals’ confident march into “the middle of the road.” The American liberals and British socialists began to wonder whether their own success in reforming capitalism deprived them of agendas to fight for as well as enemies to fight against. Many of the radical heresies in the early 1930s, such as a minimum wage, progressive taxes, and a social security system, had become part of the furniture to varying degrees in both countries’ politics. “me-too Republicans” and “Butlerite Tories,” once regarded as politically impotent freaks, now commanded national politics.Footnote ⁶ Worst of all, the people of their countries, already drained by the long struggle during the decades of depression, war, and reform, seemed to want nothing but “a rest from change” or “a vacation from public responsibilities.”Footnote ⁷ For the liberals and socialists, this era slid into political doldrums that doomed their parties to an irreversible decline and eventual demise. “The end of ideology” was not a good sign for “the party of reform.”Footnote ⁸

This shared sense of crisis moved the American liberals and British socialists closer than ever before. On each side of the Atlantic, nowhere was the sense of crisis more acutely felt than in the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Revisionist faction of the Labour Party. These two groups were, as they often called each other, the “progressive cousins.” Since it had been founded in 1947, partly inspired by the Labour government's “brave attempt to establish democratic socialism in war-weary and war-ravished England,” the ADA pushed the Democratic Party relentlessly toward the stance of the “democratic left.” As its cofounder Arthur Schlesinger Jr stated, liberals of the ADA believed that “the best hope for the world lies in the mutual understanding between British and American progressives.”Footnote ⁹ Labour Revisionists were no less convinced than the liberals that “a closer collaboration” between the Atlantic progressive forces was essential to “the progress of the democratic cause” in both countries. Every major Revisionist visited the United States in this period—often at the ADA's behest and expense—and none of them failed to notice that the American liberals shared with them a set of common principles, including “social justice, economic security, and political freedom”Footnote ¹⁰

Through their transatlantic collaboration, the ADA liberals and Labor Revisionists developed new political ideologies, each of which was articulated by the mid-1950s as “qualitative liberalism” and “new socialism.”Footnote ¹¹ Although their respective slogans of “quality of life” and “classless society” seemed to have nothing in common, both ideologies represented the shifting focus of Anglo-American progressive politics from reforming the economic system to promoting social equality by building a more comprehensive welfare state. Despite the improvements in mass living standards, they felt their societies remained profoundly unequal. To their eyes, the most obvious form of inequality was the denial of basic rights to racial minorities in America and the traditional status hierarchy in Britain. Future reform thus must begin with these problems. Fundamentally, this task required the enhancement of public services in education, health, housing, culture, environment, and transportation. Certainly their ideologies had blind spots. The Labourites, while celebrating the inchoate decolonization of the British Empire, largely overlooked “the afterlife of the empire” that would generate a set of new racial and social tensions and thereby help reshape the British welfare state.Footnote ¹² The American liberals, assured in their country's populist tradition, were inattentive to the male, “breadwinner” normativity in their vision of the welfare state.Footnote ¹³ Despite these and other weaknesses, these postwar liberals and socialists understood that inadequate public services disproportionately damaged the least-privileged citizens, depriving them of equal opportunities for wealth, dignity, and advancement. This situation threatened a declining quality of life as it solidified class distinctions. In the pursuit of social equality, therefore, equal opportunity and the welfare state represented a single inseparable issue.

The collaboration between these liberals and socialists marked a distinctive feature of Anglo-American progressive politics in the 1950s. To be sure, this mode of transatlantic interaction did not come from nothing. The postwar intellectuals were indebted to democratic socialists and progressives of the early twentieth century who envisioned, as historian James T. Kloppenberg writes, “a society in which equality guarantees the exercise of freedom.” Also, much of their respective policy agendas, such as urban planning, public education, and progressive taxation, had been developed at the local level on both shores of the Atlantic during the early century.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite these undeniable influences, however, the early-century transatlantic interactions were not directly linked to party politics at the national level. Personal contacts between Democratic and Labour leaders had been, as Schlesinger recalled, “surprisingly meagre” until the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁵ Only after both parties could claim to be “the party of ideas” in that decade did the collaboration between the liberals and socialists begin to become critically relevant to the direction of their parties at national level. And with their new influence in their parties, these liberal and socialist intellectuals moved their parties of reform away from the political wilderness and ideological doldrums of the 1950s.

II

In the last months of World War II, two successive events smashed the nascent “democratic left” movement in the American liberal camp. The first was the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. To those liberals who had lived through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II with Roosevelt in the White House, his sudden death seemed to signal the drastic end of the golden age of liberal reform. Three months later, in July, another startling bit of news hit the perplexed liberals—the Labour Party's unexpected victory in the British general election. For some, this only exaggerated their anxiety, for they thought of Labourites as not only pro-Soviet socialists but also (not unlike the Conservatives) imperialists and subjects to Buckingham Palace.Footnote ¹⁶ Many other liberals, however, saw the Labour victory as a watershed of a new age of reform. None held this view more strongly than liberals in the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), the ADA's precursor, founded in 1941, who proclaimed themselves as “the best American friends of British Labor.” These liberals were convinced that, as UDA director James Loeb Jr. stated, the Labour victory of 1945 was “the most significant event of this generation from the point of view of democratic progressives.”Footnote ¹⁷

The American liberals’ enthusiasm for the Labour victory reflected their conviction that the fate of the democratic left in the United States was tied to that of the Labour government. The liberals believed that their goal was not unlike that of British socialists—the creation of a more perfect welfare state. The Labour manifesto of 1945 pledged to provide useful work, proper social security, a better education, and high and rising standards of living for all citizens.Footnote ¹⁸ To many American liberals, these items were almost identical to their own programs—most notably presented in Roosevelt's “Second Bill of Rights” of 1944. In this landmark State of the Union address, Roosevelt promised all Americans, “regardless of station, race, or creed,” a useful job, a decent house, adequate medical care, good education, higher living standards, and “protection from economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”Footnote ¹⁹ Since British Labour and American left liberals started from a similar vision for postwar society, the success of the Labour government would vindicate the liberals’ vision. For the liberals, in other words, Labour-led Britain would demonstrate a possible and desirable model for postwar America.Footnote ²⁰

The pilgrimage to Britain was popular among these American liberals and few returned unenchanted. They saw the Labour government's “third way” as a genuinely social-democratic alternative to both exploitative capitalism and coercive totalitarian communism. Chester Bowles, the ghostwriter of Roosevelt's “Second Bill of Rights,” visited Britain in 1946 and declared that British socialism was thoroughly democratic and perfectly aligned with American liberalism.Footnote ²¹ Reinhold Niebuhr, a founder of the UDA, asserted that the Clement Attlee government was charting a previously untrodden political course between “the Scylla of tyrannical political power and the Charybdis of tyrannical economic power.” In less than a year, he stated, the Labour government assured the “less explicitly socialistic” American liberals that all socialist programs such as national health insurance, economic planning, and nationalization of major industries could be achieved “within the framework of freedom.”Footnote ²² Through these years, the UDA London office sent home celebratory reports on the creation of the welfare state under the Labour government. In one such report, David D. Williams, the director of the office, noted that Britain had become “a sort of bigger and better Scandinavia” by creating “a social security system even more comprehensive than the Beveridge cradle-to-grave proposals.”Footnote ²³

American liberals’ admiration for Britain was reinforced by a series of Labour MPs’ American lecture tours. Patrick Gordon-Walker, the former Oxford historian and adviser to the party's moderate faction leader Herbert Morrison, was the first among the Labour MPs who accepted James Loeb's request for teaching “our fuzzy liberals about the dynamic developments in England.”Footnote ²⁴ Through his lectures during January 1947, he preached that Britain was undergoing a “great social revolution” in which its citizens came to enjoy better opportunities in culture, leisure, and education, as well as “full employment and social security from the cradle to the grave.” “For the first time in human history,” he asserted, the people under the Labour government were treated as “whole humans, with families, subject to accident and ill health, with cultural and social needs.”Footnote ²⁵ As Loeb wrote to Morrison, Gordon-Walker's lecture tour was “outstandingly successful” in educating American liberals about the Labour philosophy. As numerous letters from ADA local chapters and its friendly organizations stated, these liberals felt that the Labour Party's socialism was not unlike their own ideology. Eugenie Anderson of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party described it simply as “social democracy.”Footnote ²⁶

Amid Gordon-Walker's US lecture tour in January 1947, the Americans for Democratic Action was officially launched. Some 130 liberal luminaries from various backgrounds attended its founding convention—among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, New York Senator Herbert Lehman, Kentucky governor Wilson Wyatt, Walter White of the NAACP, David Lloyd and Leon Keyserling from the Truman administration, and union leaders such as David Dubinsky and James Carey.Footnote ²⁷ Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers called on the ADA, along with other labor and civil rights groups, to create a “third force” in American politics.Footnote ²⁸ The ADA did not hide its ideological tie with the British Labour Party. The organization's domestic policy proposals, its strong anticommunist and civil rights planks aside, almost mirrored the Attlee government's social and welfare programs. The proposals included a higher minimum wage, economic planning, and a social security system “broad enough to maintain adequate standards of nutrition, education, medical care, and housing in all sections of the country.” With these policies, the ADA expected, American liberals would follow in British Labour's footsteps through a middle course between “the rigid inflexibility of the powerful state and the anarchy of rugged individualism.”Footnote ²⁹

Saving American Capitalism, a collection of essays published in 1948, revealed the ADA's blueprint for a social-democratic America. As its title indicates, all twenty-four authors felt pressed to reform capitalism to save it from its self-inflicted, impending collapse. Seymour Harris, the editor of this volume, noted that “unless we perform surgery on our economic system, it will not survive.” According to the authors, capitalism's proclivity for instability and inequality could be checked only by the government, which was responsible for asserting public control over private enterprise and ensuring that all citizens enjoyed equitable living conditions.Footnote ³⁰ Through the volume, the authors made clear their intellectual debt to European socialism, and to the British Labour programs in particular. Adolf A. Berle Jr, for example, urged the Democratic Party to accept socialism as “a method of obtaining an objective, useful in certain regards.” Some even went so far as to suggest that the nationalization of major industries deserved a place on the liberal economic agenda.Footnote ³¹ As one reviewer noted, this volume showed that there were “many roads to social democracy” and “American liberals were moving toward common ground with British Laborites.”Footnote ³²

While chasing British Labour's footsteps, these liberals emphasized that the main enemy of this program within the United States was conservatism rather than communism. Chester Bowles, to whom Saving American Capitalism was dedicated, argued that a welfare state was the surest bulwark against communism's “economic democracy,” which promised people in poverty a better life through land reforms, central planning, and the socialization of property. The government must provide every citizen with a good education, public housing, national health care, and social security. American conservatives, claimed Bowles, were ready to frustrate any such positive efforts, branding them “bureaucratic, unsound, socialistic, communistic, or just plain foolish” and insisting that the best way to improve the public welfare was to further increase the wealth of the few. These “Hayeks” of Wall Street and the National Association of Manufacturers were far more destructive to American society than “the inept communists” were. If liberals lost their political battle against the right-wing ideologues, he warned, these well-funded and well-organized conservatives would bring America back to the pre-New Deal era's “do-nothing government.” Perhaps this might bring back a golden age for the business class, but that would be disastrous for the American people.Footnote ³³

Arthur Schlesinger Jr was arguably one of the strongest liberal advocates of British socialism. In particular, his 1947 Partisan Review essay on “the future of socialism” gave him instant national notoriety as a “New Deal socialist.” In this essay, he asserted that European socialism, having enough internal checks to guarantee individual freedom, would likely “evolve new and real forms for the expression of democracy.” This somewhat heretical view of socialism was established upon his firsthand observation of the British Labour Party during his stay in London as an officer of the Office of Strategic Services. In these years, Schlesinger was admitted into Aneurin Bevan's inner circle (known as the “Keep Left group”) and closely associated with young leftwing Labour MPs, such as Richard Crossman and Ian Mikardo. As he recalled later, these Bevanite socialists, with their unequivocal anticommunism and ambitious plans for social and welfare programs, made him more convinced that “the best hope for postwar Europe lay in the non-communist left.”Footnote ³⁴

Indeed, Schlesinger's “vital center” belonged to what he and other ADA liberals called the noncommunist left. In his 1949 The Vital Center, often called “the ADA's political bible,” Schlesinger made clear that the vital center must reject not only “the abyss of totalitarianism” but also “the jungle of capitalism.” Capitalism, he stressed, was inherently prone to be “the tyranny of irresponsible plutocracy,” unless a democratic alliance between the government and the “non-business classes” checked capitalist economic power. He considered American liberals and British socialists to be political twins of the noncommunist left and urged them to cooperate to build a social-democratic society—one simultaneously more libertarian and egalitarian than the existing capitalist one. The model for such a society was Britain under the Labour government. Britain, stated Schlesinger, had “already submitted itself to social democracy; the United States will very likely advance in that direction through a series of New Deals.”Footnote ³⁵

When the ADA was formed in 1947, the American political landscape seemed unfavorable to its vision of a social-democratic America. After the death of Roosevelt, whose magnetic charisma had kept the Democratic Party's ever-precarious unity for a dozen years, the party split into factions. Bowles, Humphrey, and other liberal Democrats relentlessly pushed President Truman toward the ADA's anticommunist, pro-civil rights, and social-democratic positions. This intensified the intra-party revolts from both Strom Thurmond's southern Dixiecrats and Henry Wallace's popular-front Progressive Party. The ADA's policy proposals went nowhere, partly due to resistance from the conservative “Dixie–GOP” coalition in Congress. It was also due to ADA liberals’ refusal of any “fellow-traveling” with Progressives. Truman, aware that he already had enough enemies, took no public stance in this turmoil. Increasingly skeptical about the upcoming presidential election in 1948, some ADA liberals were involved in the “dump Truman” campaign—not a few were even in the “draft Eisenhower” operation. These liberals feared, as Humphrey wrote to Loeb, that Truman's candidacy would produce not only a Democratic fiasco in the election but also “a disintegration of the whole social-democratic block in this country.”Footnote ³⁶

It did not take long before Truman electrified the skeptical liberals. His campaign in 1948 was dynamic and aggressive—and seemed to follow Humphrey's speech at the convention that urged Democrats “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”Footnote ³⁷ Through the campaign, Truman moved quickly toward the ADA positions. He mobilized urban machine bosses and labor leaders to collaborate with the liberals; put several ADA members in his inner circle; and supported a Democratic platform drafted by Joseph Rauh Jr, the platform that the ADA applauded as “the most forthright and liberal document of its kind ever offered the American people by a majority party.”Footnote ³⁸ The president stood for national health insurance, a higher minimum wage, the expansion of the social security, “public power and cheap electricity,” and civil rights programs—even while acknowledging that “some of the members of my own party disagree with me violently.”Footnote ³⁹ Throughout the whistle-stop campaign, Truman did not hesitate to assail “Wall Street reactionaries,” “Republican gluttons of privilege,” and “the do-nothing Eightieth Congress.” Starting from “the loneliest campaign,” Truman emerged as a new polestar in American liberalism.Footnote ⁴⁰

With Truman's dramatic upset victory—an echo of what Attlee had accomplished three years earlier—the democratic left reached its climax in the United States. Schlesinger hailed the election as evidence that “the third force” of social democracy in Europe was actually “the first force” in America.Footnote ⁴¹ Truman's Fair Deal, in its scope and scale, was broader than the New Deal's focus on economic relief and basic measures of social security. Certainly, the Fair Deal was the brainchild of the president who was convinced that the United States was “better able than ever before to meet the needs of the American people.”Footnote ⁴² At the same time, the ADA was given full credit for having inspired Truman's social and welfare programs—especially for its long-standing efforts to solidify a “rationale for the Fair Deal.”Footnote ⁴³ The ADA's desire to transplant the British welfare state “from cradle to grave” was seemingly about to be realized. Some of the Fair Deal's programs in health care and public housing referred directly to the Labour government's legislation, such as the National Insurance Act.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Alonzo Hamby and other historians have argued, during Truman's second term American politics moved into the moment of social-democratic experimentation.Footnote ⁴⁵

III

While American liberals were taking a bold step toward social democracy, British Labour's hour of triumph was about to fade. After it lost power in the election of 1951, the party entered one of the most dismal periods in its history, marked by successive electoral defeats, a lack of clear policy, and intra-party squabbling between the Bevanite left and the Gaitskellite Revisionists. As Perry Anderson famously observed, postwar affluence and the Cold War inflicted a “double taboo” on the leftist cause and occluded Labour's struggle for socialism in the 1950s. Rapid economic growth and the welfare state—achievements of which Labour had ample reason to be proud—enhanced mass living standards but paradoxically weakened the party's more radical stands. Simultaneously, the Cold War made the Labour Party defensive. As socialism of all sorts was associated with Stalin's dictatorship, Labourites of all factions had become more vulnerable to the rightwing accusation of being “soft” on communism—or even being “crypto-communist.” As Anderson notes, “full employment and rising incomes rendered the classical socialist solutions—in particular social ownership of the means of production—redundant; the specter of Russian totalitarianism rendered them menacing.”Footnote ⁴⁶

This crisis pushed the Labour Party into a critical reappraisal of its policy and philosophy. Public ownership came under criticism. In both Fabian socialism and the Attlee ministry's “corporate socialism,” the nationalization of major industries had been the sovereign remedy for the malaise of the capitalist system. The Fabian manifesto of 1884 declared that unless private ownership was socialized, British society was bound to collapse amid mass poverty and unsustainable inequality. The urgent task for the old Fabians was, therefore, to install well-managed public enterprises to make full use of national resources to improve working people's living conditions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Attlee government pushed the nationalization program on this ground. The Labour manifesto of 1950, for example, promoted public ownership as a means of economic growth to sustain “full employment” at home and Britain's status as a “global power” in the world. In the 1950s, however, this logic sounded increasingly old-fashioned. As Evan Durbin and other Labour leaders admitted, mass poverty had diminished mainly through nonsocialist solutions—especially through John Maynard Keynes's fiscal policy and William Beveridge's welfare programs.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the contrary, public ownership was increasingly seen not as the solution to the problems of capitalism but as the problem itself.

In the Labour Party's reappraisal of the nationalization program, American liberals played a significant role. Neither postwar affluence nor the Cold War was a distinctively British phenomenon; both had arrived first at the United States and made the American left their first “victim.” Among the most influential critics of nationalization were John Kenneth Galbraith and Reinhold Niebuhr. Galbraith argued that nationalization was an outdated measure designed by Fabian socialists half a century ago to fight against the obsolete model of laissez-faire capitalism. This approach was unsuited to deal with the new Keynesian capitalism, which solved many old problems that the Fabians had aimed to solve—most notably, mass poverty.Footnote ⁴⁹ Niebuhr, meanwhile, though not entirely against nationalization, was critical of Labour's obsession with it as “a cure-all remedy.” This dogmatic adherence to public ownership led Labourites to miss the key point that the concentration of power—no matter if it was in the hands of capitalists or the state bureaucracy—had a propensity toward injustice and inequality.Footnote ⁵⁰ To borrow from Perry Anderson, if Galbraith's “economics of abundance” reminded British socialists that nationalization was “redundant,” Niebuhr's ethical realism warned them that it was potentially “menacing.”

Richard Crossman, a Labour MP and editor of the New Statesman, served as an intermediary for the transatlantic conversation between American liberals and British socialists.Footnote ⁵¹ He agreed with Galbraith that capitalists, “no less skillful at adapting their systems than other human beings,” had developed “planned welfare capitalism” and resolved a range of perennial problems in their society, including socialism's oldest enemy—mass poverty. This development in capitalism precluded socialists from resorting to their old mantra that “socialism would work and capitalism would not.” What they must prove was that socialism was “morally better than capitalism.” Yet here was a dilemma. Capitalism, no doubt, had enormous injustices, but no one could assume that socialism would inherently be more moral. An acknowledged “Niebuhrian socialist,” Crossman believed that human institutions would always be immoral “unless they are moralized by individual men and women aware of this proclivity and waging unceasing war against it. Every economic system, whether capitalist or socialist, degenerates into a system of privilege and exploitation unless it is policed by a social morality.” This belief made him aware of the “inherent contradiction” in socialism—between its inclination to the concentration of power and its end of increasing freedom and equality among citizens.Footnote ⁵²

Crossman's awareness of socialism's “inherent contradiction” placed him at the heart of the Labour Party's identity crisis in this period. Significantly, he served as midwife for the birth of both the Bevanite left and the Gaitskellite Revisionists—the two factions that collided with each other all the way through Labour's opposition years of 1951–64. Bevanism was born in 1947 with the publication of Keep Left, a manifesto written by Crossman, Ian Mikardo, and Michael Foot. In opposition to Herbert Morrison's proposal for “the consolidation of existing achievements,” these young leftwing MPs argued for the “all-out socialism” positive in both foreign and domestic policy, including “the continued nationalization of industries and services.”Footnote ⁵³ At the same time, however, Crossman was a leading proponent of liberal or “libertarian” socialism best known for his editorship of the anticommunist collection The God That Failed, published in 1949. Crossman believed that the goal of socialism was “not merely the raising of living standards or the achievement of equality but the enlargement of individual freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This belief was relevant to distinctively Revisionist arguments and helped Crossman work closely with Gaitskellite MPs, including Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, despite their mutual disagreements and even personal antipathy.Footnote ⁵⁵

The collaboration among these backbenchers came to fruition with the publication of New Fabian Essays in 1952, the volume edited by Crossman and widely considered “the beginning of Revisionism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Written in the years of alleged “consensus” in British politics in which the tensions over the “decline” of British industrialism and the coming of multiracial society had yet to be acutely perceived by many Britons, the essays focused primarily on the curse of the status quo.Footnote ⁵⁷ In particular, the authors called attention to the lethargy of their party, which was “in danger of becoming not the party of change, but the defender of the postwar status quo.”Footnote ⁵⁸ And these new Fabians diagnosed that their party had lost its bearings when facing a double challenge—one from welfare capitalism and the other from totalitarianism.

Welfare capitalism raised a question about socialists’ long-held belief in capitalism's inherent instability. The new Fabians agreed that the advanced capitalist countries like the United States and Britain had already entered what Anthony Crosland termed “the post-capitalist society.” In this society, the old capitalist doctrines of free market, profit motive, property rights, and competition had been displaced by the new principles of state responsibility, full employment, social security, and cross-class cooperation. Terrified by this irresistible and irreversible trend, capitalists had handed their power over to the emerging “managerial classes” in labor unions, corporations, and state bureaucracies. Crosland warned his fellow socialists not to underestimate the implication of these changes. This new form of society, given its high levels of social stability and economic growth, would “prove to be a very enduring one.” Even judged by socialist standards, post-capitalist society was not a minor modification of capitalism; it was, he asserted, “a major social revolution.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As capitalism changed, socialism needed to be changed accordingly. According to the new Fabians, the Labour Party had tried to rebuild Britain along socialist lines through the socialization of private property. This effort, however, had simply accelerated a tendency already prevalent in the advanced capitalist countries: the rise of the managerial society. This tendency did not move toward socialism; instead it resulted, as Galbraith, Adolf Berle, and other American thinkers had observed, in “oligopolistic” corporate capitalism. Even worse, in many less developed countries the concentration of power in the state bureaucracy had paved the way for totalitarian dictatorship, with Stalin's Soviet Union as its extreme case. Of course, the fear of totalitarianism was not new in British socialist thought. Nevertheless, the older Labour leaders, including Attlee, Bevan, and even Herbert Morrison, had regarded centralized planning and public ownership as the core of Labour's socialism. The new Fabians began to see these symbols of Labour's “high noon” as symptoms of “the century of totalitarianism.”Footnote ⁶⁰ With this new understanding of the dangers posed by excessive centralization, New Fabian Essays revealed, as one historian notes, “a sea change” in the Labour Party's view on nationalization.Footnote ⁶¹

To keep socialism alive in the face of challenges from welfare capitalism and totalitarianism, the new Fabians argued, socialism's basic principle must be restated. According to them, the abiding goal of socialism was not the socialization of the means of production but “equality for its own sake.”Footnote ⁶² Yet for these socialists, equality was less about the material condition than the “parity of esteem,” a sense of fair and equal treatment between every fellow citizen. Though their society might be less unequal than the United States in the sense that the gap between the rich and the poor was narrower, Britain was, as George Orwell famously stated, “the most class-ridden country under the sun.” Privilege, snobbery, and status hierarchy were deeply embedded in British society and culture. In this situation, “fair shares for all” would not be enough. A genuinely socialist “classless society,” they stressed, would come only through a persistent democratic process of education, persuasion, and agitation “to eradicate the sense of class and to create in its place a sense of common interest and equal status.” As Crossman wrote, “the socialist society is not the norm, evolved by material conditions, but the exception, imposed on immoral society by human will and social conscience.”Footnote ⁶³

The Labour Party's soul-searching captured the attention of American liberals who increasingly felt that a similar fate lay in store for them. John P. Roche, the political scientist and future president of the ADA, observed that the “embourgeoisement” of the British working class under the Labour government made British socialism “nothing more than Rooseveltian New Dealism masquerading as socialism.” In his diagnosis, Labour and the Democrats were in a similar transitional “identity crisis” in which both parties had realized their old dream but had yet to find a new one.Footnote ⁶⁴ Irwin Ross, the political journalist of the ADA, also noticed that Labour's “crisis of faith” originated from the exhaustion of its to-do list. The Attlee ministry's “cautious revolution” had aimed to reform capitalism and achieved this objective. What they had not expected was the scenario in which economic reform alone failed to create a new society.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, the ADA London office watched with sympathetic eyes as the Labour Party became “the victim of its own success.” The ordeal of the British cousins seemingly signaled their own fate in the near future.Footnote ⁶⁶

Concerned about their own future, American liberals paid particular attention to the vision of a “classless society” that the socialists offered as the breakthrough in Labour's identity crisis. Seymour Harris, the editor of Saving American Capitalism, convened three of his ADA Harvard colleagues—Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Samuel Beer—to review New Fabian Essays.Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite their political affinity and personal friendship with the socialists under review, their assessment was, as Harris noted, “highly critical.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Their criticism mainly focused on the lack of concrete methods to realize the classless society. Galbraith chided the socialists that while navigating through a narrow route between the rocks of capitalism and the shoals of totalitarianism, they discarded too many items too hastily—either as inimical to individual freedom (public ownership) or as irrelevant to genuine socialism (Keynesian fiscal policy). If all these programs were proscribed, he wrote, “even the most ingenious socialist ha[d] little room left for maneuver.” Consequently, the socialists floundered in ideological doldrums where “very little socialism is left in socialism, and nothing much else is available to take its place.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Samuel Beer delved deeper into this issue by pointing out the elusive nature of culture and ethics in the socialists’ classless society. What was specifically, he asked, “the quality of life among the people” that socialism sought to create? While insisting that bettering material conditions was not an end in itself and dreaming of a society pervaded by richer culture and higher ethics, the socialists paid little attention to “what the culture or ethic or social tone of a socialist society ought to be.” To be fair, they had a noble aim: “to create ‘a classless society’ where all enjoy ‘parity of esteem’ and the still lingering ‘sense of an unequal society’ has been eradicated.” But admirable as it was, this aim still required “some positive and more concrete content.” A classless society, Beer emphasized, was not created simply by eradicating class feeling; it must be filled with “a positive feeling of respect for all engaged in a common purpose.” And this common purpose could not be an abstraction. The socialists, in other words, envisioned a society morally and culturally better than the “bourgeois society,” but they had yet to know what the shape of that society should be.Footnote ⁷⁰

The question underlying such criticism was whether the classless society was really different from the society that the American liberals sought to create. Schlesinger argued that if the socialists wanted to enlarge individual freedom and avoid the concentration of power, “the New Deal and Fair Deal solution” demonstrated that these things were compatible with social security, economic planning, and sufficient public control over economic power. The socialists tried to distinguish their vision with the concept of equality. However, once the socialists’ own definition of equality—that is, “equal status” regardless of social origin—was accepted, one might encounter a curious irony that there was “far more felt social equality (the race question aside) in America, with its [greater] economic inequalities, than in Britain, with its closer approximation to economic uniformity.” In this sense, the classless society resembled America where a sense of parity, a populist aversion to elitism, and the “myth” of class mobility were embedded in its society and culture. “In their next go-around,” Schlesinger advised, the socialists must take up “this equality question more seriously and at greater length.”Footnote ⁷¹

Equality, the quality of life, and America—these were the issues on which British socialists had equivocated. Indeed, when Schlesinger sent a copy of the review, the socialist writers acknowledged this problem and appreciated the American friends’ “sympathetic and extremely acute” criticism. “Sam Beer is quite right,” wrote Gaitskell. The “backbenchers” of New Fabian Essays neglected the concrete contents needed to create a socialist classless society. This issue, he promised, was to be addressed in “the second volume of Fabian Essays.”Footnote ⁷² Jenkins and Crossman also agreed with the American reviewers that the questions of equality and quality of life had to be restated. Under the challenges of postwar affluence and Soviet totalitarianism, British socialism more resembled American liberalism than Labourism of the 1930s.Footnote ⁷³ While observing this tendency, Niebuhr remarked that once the new Fabians “buried orthodox Marxism as a political force,” then the American reviewers “provided the coup de Grace and then acted as undertakers.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Both sides of the transatlantic debate were aware of this. “Communication is needed,” Crossman wrote to Schlesinger, “if British Socialists and American Liberals are not going to find themselves living in two completely separate worlds.”Footnote ⁷⁵

IV

It would not take long before American liberals’ confidence in the “New Deal–Fair Deal solution” diminished. The Democratic Party lost in the 1952 election, ending its twenty-year tenure in the White House. Postwar affluence and the Cold War dampened the fighting spirit of “the party of reform” in America too. After the New Deal and Fair Deal, the American people seemed uninterested in another deal with Democrats. Galbraith bitterly noted that under the condition of prosperity, Dwight Eisenhower, the guardian of the status quo, could coast to an easy victory simply by asserting that “there would be no important backward change.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Meanwhile, the hysteria of McCarthyism made liberals timid. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his allies—including not a few conservative Democrats—rarely made distinctions between Cold War liberal “doves” and “hawks.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Perplexed and frightened, liberals watched the triumph of Eisenhower's “middle way,” which seemingly offered Americans a political sanctuary not only from the reactionaries but also from liberal “do-gooders” and “fellow-travelers.”

After Eisenhower's inauguration, Adlai Stevenson took a world tour. The trip went well until he faced a grim reality at his final destination. “While in Britain,” he wrote to Galbraith, “I talked with some old friends in the Labor Party, and was impressed with the fact that they are totally becalmed and have exhausted their program and have no present basic objectives.” For the defeated Democratic leader, this was not just the plight of others. “We may be in the same position,” Stevenson sighed.Footnote ⁷⁸ When the Labour Party lost again in 1955 and Hugh Gaitskell, “British Adlai,” as he was called in the American press, subsequently rose to be opposition leader, it seemed clearer for both Democrats and Labourites that they were in parallel trouble.Footnote ⁷⁹ “Labor, as our Democratic Party,” stated Niebuhr in 1955, “laid the foundation for its electoral failure by its success.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Alarmed by this trend, Schlesinger urged Stevenson to meet Gaitskell. Since the Labour leader confronted “rather similar problems,” wrote Schlesinger, his reflection of his party's dilemma would be “very suggestive” to the Democrats as well.Footnote ⁸¹

American liberals and British socialists were soon to have a chance to get together. In September 1955, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the US-funded anticommunist organization, held an international conference in Milan, Italy. Attended by hundreds of leading intellectuals from some thirty-five countries, this conference, entitled The Future of Freedom, marked a key event in the transnational intellectual movement in the early Cold War era.Footnote ⁸² The most visible and vociferous group in Milan was the so-called “ADA–Labour alliance.”Footnote ⁸³ Gaitskell and his “lieutenants,” including Crosland, Jenkins, and Denis Healy, dominated all the stages of the conference from the organizing committee to penal discussion. And everywhere they found support from their American friends, such as Galbraith, Schlesinger, and George F. Kennan.Footnote ⁸⁴ The conference's statement of purpose, drafted by Crossman and Sidney Hook, reflected what these socialists and liberals had discussed for years: “At midpoint in the twentieth century, the terms of yesterday's programs must no longer divide us. Our concepts of socialism and capitalism, of economic planning and the market economy, of nationalization, of full employment, of social welfare, of taxation, of colonialism, have [been] profoundly altered as the result of recent decades.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The term “welfare state” was suggested as a political amalgam of socialism and liberalism. In defense of it, the ADA–Labour alliance delivered a parallel attack on those “reactionaries” who apparently still clung to “the terms of yesterday's programs.” Their favorite villain was Friedrich Hayek. In Milan, Hayek preached what he called the “old-Whig liberalism,” insisting that the welfare states under political democracy were “more dangerous in written liberty than some of the limited autocracies.” Whereas an “extensive bad government” simply repressed liberty and thereby aroused the revolt for liberty, an “extensive good government” would “smother the spirit of liberty.” Therefore, he warned, the line that separated “the welfare state from the totalitarian state [was] a thin and indistinct one.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Gaitskell denounced this argument as a “dangerous nonsense.” The welfare state, “now a more or less permanent feature” in Britain, had not “in any way whatever interfered with or altered the nature of British political freedom.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Galbraith backed the Labour leader. Although both America and Britain had been rushing down what Hayek called “the road to serfdom,” there was “no more evidence of slavery.” This demonstrated that this road was, said Galbraith, “entirely consistent with freedom.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The ADA–Labour alliance handily crushed Hayek in Milan, yet the victory was more bitter than sweet. They felt that this mode of ideological battle was somewhat anachronistic given the mood of Anglo-American politics in the mid-1950s. Alongside the ADA–Labour alliance's defeat of Hayek, Daniel Bell, Michael Polanyi, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others were declaring “the end of ideology” at the Milan conference. As Bell wrote later, Western intellectuals in general agreed on “the acceptance of a welfare state, the desirability of decentralized power, a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Raymond Aaron presented a paper on Gaitskell's and Conservative R. A. Butler's almost identical domestic-policy stances, which reaffirmed his aphorism that “socialism has ceased in the West to be a myth because it has become a part of reality.”Footnote ⁹⁰ ADA liberals and Labour socialists were ready to fight for the welfare state against ideologues like Hayek. But neither of them was prepared to handle Eisenhower Republicans and Butlerite Conservatives who were winning over them by accepting a substantial part of their vision. Hayek left Milan infuriated, refusing to “write an obituary of liberty.” Their victory notwithstanding, this did not encourage the ADA liberals and Labour socialists.Footnote ⁹¹

After returning from Milan, these liberals and socialists simultaneously embarked on a political campaign to redirect their parties’ ideology. The goal of “equal opportunity for all citizens” was suggested as the new task on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1956, Schlesinger called for “qualitative liberalism” that was dedicated to “bettering the quality of people's lives and opportunities.” His message was clear: the American people now dwelled in an affluent society and thus required a new liberalism to address “the miseries of an age of abundance.” Instead of clinging to the New Deal era's mentality and “talking as if the necessities of living—a job, a square meal, a suit of clothes, and a roof—were still at stake, we should be able to count that fight won and move on to the more subtle and complicated problem of fighting for individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a mass society.” This task must start with civil rights and civil liberties—above all with equal opportunities for racial minorities by ending segregation, establishing fair practices in employment and public life, and abolishing poll taxes and other discriminatory measures. The Cold War provided the moral impetus for this task. So long as Americans allowed McCarthyism and segregation at home, Schlesinger warned, the world would not recognize them as the champion of freedom and equality.Footnote ⁹²

Ensuring civil rights and civil liberties was a major step, but it was only the first in a longer and more complex process to rehabilitate “a sense of the public interest.” Schlesinger underlined the disparity between private abundance and public poverty: “Here is a nation richer than ever before, and getting even richer every moment, and yet devoting a decreasing share of its wealth to the public welfare.” Under Republican leadership, he claimed, shops overflowed with luxuries and consumer goods while schools were dilapidated, roads filthier, cities dirtier, and parks and playgrounds overcrowded. Liberals, therefore, should assert “the general welfare against the false notion that the unlimited pursuit of profit will guarantee the general welfare.” They could then see all public programs—education, health care, public housing, urban and environmental planning, and welfare services for the aged—from a new perspective as the vital measures to improve the quality of people's lives. After the long “sterile” and “rethinking” period, Schlesinger came out with confidence to show “the party of reform” the way to escape from the political doldrums in the post-ideological era.Footnote ⁹³

Led by Gaitskell, the British Labour Party was moving in a similar direction under the banner of the “new socialism.” Indeed, the new socialism was articulated upon Labour Revisionists’ close observation of American society and their interactions with American liberals.Footnote ⁹⁴ Most notably, Anthony Crosland meticulously recorded what he observed during his 1954 US lecture tour in a fifty-page handwritten memo. This memo revealed that his interest in America was serious and covered a wide range of topics, including “economy,” “party system,” “civil rights,” “the South,” “school system,” and “class system.” After critically assessing these topics, Crosland reached an unconventional conclusion: even though American society was neither free nor equal—as his lengthy discussion of civil rights and McCarthyism indicated—in terms of “social relations” it was far more equal than Britain.Footnote ⁹⁵ Growing out of New Fabian Essays, the new socialism inherited its themes: the arrival of an affluent society, the fear of totalitarianism, and the aspiration for a “classless society.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Crosland and other Revisionists of the mid-1950s began to see these familiar themes through the lens of America and get a fresh perspective on the solutions to their own problems.

Based on his research of American society, Crosland redrew the shape of a “classless society” in his 1956 classic The Future of Socialism and a series of essays featured in Encounter. He urged socialists to move away from “economic politics” and toward “social politics.” According to him, social politics was a “characteristic of periods of prosperity, rising incomes, [and] full employment,” when people's attention was diverted from “the problem of subsistence” to social and cultural discontents.Footnote ⁹⁷ Through the reforms under the Attlee government, Britain had already reached such a period—when “further redistribution would make little difference to the standard of living” of most of its citizens. Despite its success in economic reform, however, the Labour government left Britain's class system unreconstructed. Consequently, Britons, in the midst of prosperity and greater economic equality, increasingly resented “class stratification and social inequality.” Crosland contended that the task more urgent than the further redistribution of wealth was a “just distribution of privileges and rewards” among citizens to ensure them “an equal opportunity for wealth, advancement, and renown.”Footnote ⁹⁸

As the first step toward a classless society, Crosland advised socialists to create “a mobile equal-opportunity society on the American pattern.” According to him, the United States was—the race problem aside—something like a “sociological utopia,” where its intrinsic egalitarianism guaranteed class mobility while the rudiments of a welfare state ameliorated the frictions inherent in such a mobile society.Footnote ⁹⁹ As for specific policies to create an equal-opportunity society, Crosland, along with other Labourites like Jenkins and John Strachey, emphasized reform of education and taxation. Compared to the “comprehensive” American educational system centered on community-based schools, British education was essentially aristocratic. The prestige gap between the privileged “public (i.e. private) schools” and the others perpetuated social inequality by thwarting upward movement from below. “We shall not have equality of opportunity,” he wrote, “so long as we maintain a system of superior private schools.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Simultaneously, a strong advocate for progressive taxes, Crosland proposed the increase of nearly all types of tax—gift tax, death duties, property tax, and capital gains tax. This proposal was well aligned with his belief that economic inequalities originated from inherited property or unearned incomes that betrayed the ideal of equal opportunity for all citizens. Crosland's “fiscal socialism” also reflected his ethical judgment that “more equality, even though carrying few implications for the sum of economic satisfaction, would yet conduce to a ‘better’ society.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Most fundamentally, the vision of qualitative liberalism showed Crosland and other Revisionists a more concrete picture of a classless society.Footnote ¹⁰² In the United States, Crosland observed, liberals were “much less concerned to promote more social equality or material welfare, of which plenty exist[ed] already, than with reforms lying outside the field of socialist–capitalist controversy, yet still the subject of acute Left–Right dispute: civil liberties, or the Negro problem, or foreign policy, or crime, or the sociological problems of a mass society.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Once Britain achieved such levels of social equality and material welfare, socialists here would also pay more attention to the spheres of “personal freedom, happiness, and cultural endeavor.” Like Schlesinger, Crosland was convinced that increasing public works and services were indispensable to making Britain “a more beautiful and civilized country.” He noted, “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 … more riverside cafes, more pleasure-gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places … better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In general, this was the picture of a “better society” that the American liberals and British socialists envisioned together in the mid-1950s. In Britain, as Labour Revisionists reaffirmed this picture, the terms “social equality” and “civilized country” had become the centerpiece of the Labour Party's vision of a classless society.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This vision was well received among the American liberals of the ADA. Schlesinger, for example, praised Crosland as a modern-day Eduard Bernstein and applauded his “radical” reform program as one designed to meet “the needs of ordinary people in the 1960s for a decent life in an affluent society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the United States, too, the terms “equal opportunity” and “quality of life” had come to take center stage in liberal politics. In tandem with the growing discontents with racial discrimination at the grassroots level, liberal Democrats like Humphrey and Bowles raised their voice in advocating civil rights. And both the liberals and the socialists demanded the enhancement of the government's role in education, health, housing, culture, environment, and urban planning. As America and Britain entered the 1960s, the party of reform in both countries had come out through the years in the wilderness spent soul-searching.

V

On the cusp of that era, the term “affluent society,” which had originated in Galbraith's 1958 classic, became popular among American liberals and British socialists alike. Galbraith's criticism of the “social imbalance” of postwar American society—the gap between private opulence and public poverty—provided these liberals and socialists with a new cause célèbre to attack in the age of economic affluence and political impasse. It is not unknown that Galbraith's Affluent Society inspired John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and, more importantly, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ More impressive was its intellectual influence on the Labour Party. According to a survey of 1962, Labour MPs chose Galbraith as one of the three most influential authors—together with Crosland and John Strachey—in their generation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Crossman, Crosland, Jenkins, Strachey, and Douglas Jay, among others, highlighted redressing the “social imbalance” as the Labour Party's principal task in the 1960s while comparing Affluent Society with Marx's Capital and Keynes's General Theory. Harold Wilson, the new Labour leader after Gaitskell's sudden death, declared in 1963 that the primary aim of the next Labour government was to fix the “social imbalance” which was “the inevitable consequence of the unplanned affluent society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

This convergence of American liberalism and British socialism in the 1960s did not come from nothing. The liberals and socialists had gradually approached this position through their decade-long contemplation of their parties’ grim political future. By the early 1950s, these liberals and socialists were aware that the New Deal–Fabian mission to reform capitalism had been largely accomplished. However, the arrival of the “post-capitalist society,” characterized by economic prosperity and social stability, posed a thorny question regarding the very existence of political progressivism. If capitalism had been reformed and their conservative rivals were ready to accept the postwar settlement on the welfare-state–political-pluralism–mixed-economy solution, why should “the party of reform” exist? Both Democratic and Labour Parties struggled in the 1950s, with successive electoral defeats and a persistent identity crisis. In search of an exit from the ideological doldrums, the liberals and socialists watched with keen and sympathetic eyes political developments on the other side of the Atlantic and established a closer transatlantic collaboration between them. As Schlesinger wrote to Roy Jenkins, they were willing to trade the liberals’ “understanding of the mysteries of American politics” for the socialists’ “understanding of the mysteries of British politics.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

These years of reflection and collaboration had proven productive. Qualitative liberalism and the new socialism, articulated at the nadir of their parties, constituted a prelude to reform politics in the 1960s. These ideologies’ emphasis on quality of life and classless society helped to justify Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation and Harold Wilson's “liberal reforms” that included the Race Relations Act, the Commons Registration Act, and the Civic Amenities Act. Furthermore, these liberals and socialists’ demands for the expansion of public services provided an inspiration for Johnson's Great Society and Wilson's New Britain. Undoubtedly, it would be a gross exaggeration to insist that these two groups of intellectuals determined the course of reform politics in the 1960s. They were generally excluded from power—and on those rare occasions when they were near to power, both of them were burdened with internal quarrels over trivial issues, such as loyalty to Kennedy or the complete elimination of the nationalization doctrine from the Labour constitution.Footnote ¹¹¹ However, it might be equally unwise to dismiss their contributions. With their insistence on equality in social relations, these liberals and socialists facilitated the shift of Anglo-American progressive politics from reforming capitalism to establishing a better welfare state.

Beyond contributing to their countries’ reform politics, their intertwined intellectual journeys help to illuminate the crucial role of intellectuals in politics. The postwar liberals and socialists discussed in this article embraced partisan politics, positioning themselves as ideological pathfinders for the Democratic and Labour Parties. Such interstitial figures have been frequent targets for historians, often portrayed in political histories as impractical thinkers and in intellectual histories as stablemates of politicians used by power.Footnote ¹¹² In mid-century Britain and the United States, they have often been overlooked by historians interested in “public intellectuals” who boasted about their self-proclaimed independence from political power and the technocratic “experts” who were expressly uninterested in partisanship.Footnote ¹¹³ However, so long as modern democracy rests on competition among political parties, the role of partisan intellectuals should not be discounted. They help to formulate the visions of a better society that animate the policies of their parties. Social reform achieved through elections and legislation requires such visions no less than revolutions and grassroots movements; politics needs partisan intellectuals as much as it does experts and critics. The political participation of intellectuals is thus a topic vital to understanding political and intellectual histories—no mere curio from the era of Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Hill.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The postwar intellectuals’ engagements with party politics nudged them to enter the transatlantic conversation. For all the presumed kinship between the two English-speaking “cousin” nations, American liberals and British socialists operated in remarkably different environments. Obviously, the United States was much more affluent than war-ravaged Britain, while Britain boasted a better welfare system. The liberals and socialists, like many of their contemporaries, might have been content with the “superiority” of their own countries, but instead they eagerly sought to learn from each other in search of visions that might rescue their parties of reform from the perceived ideological doldrums of the 1950s. Certainly they failed to achieve fully what they envisioned together, and many of the programs they enacted have since been eroded by the “revolutions” of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. One might even argue that their denunciation of totalitarianism and hasty retreat from attempts to reform economic structure inadvertently precipitated the rise of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and thereafter.Footnote ¹¹⁵ However, their transatlantic collaboration brought out a powerful vision of progressive politics for expansion of the welfare state—a vision that might well resonate with the Americans and Britons now struggling to reinvigorate progressivism in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, perhaps even encouraging them to cooperate once again.