The Webbs and Their Work

Friedrich August von Hayek’s “The Webbs and Their Work” is a 1948 review essay on Beatrice Webb’s memoir Our Partnership, treating it as a major document for understanding the formation of modern British collectivism. Hayek reads the book less as private autobiography than as evidence of how Sidney and Beatrice Webb converted social position, disciplined labor, institutional access, and intellectual strategy into political influence.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Our Partnership for the understanding of British history in the twentieth century.

The essay’s central thesis is that the Webbs mattered because they grasped the political power of ideas before others did. Hayek grants their unselfishness and industry, but he frames these virtues as instruments of a more troubling project: the indirect capture of public opinion through elites, newspapers, schools, parties, and administrative expertise. Their aim was not primarily mass mobilization but the formation of those who would later govern, teach, write, and legislate.

They set out not 'to organize the unthinking persons into Socialist societies' but 'to make the thinking people socialistic' (p. 132).

This sentence anchors Hayek’s main conceptual move: socialism appears here as a strategy of intellectual diffusion rather than as a spontaneous democratic movement. He emphasizes the Webbs’ anonymous articles, memoranda, and influence over journals, their cultivation of the London School of Economics, and their use of Fabianism as a training ground. The institutions mattered because they allowed “views” to radiate through personal contact and professional formation.

The essay then turns from intellectual influence to political technique. Hayek presents the Webbs as masters of indirect action, coaching politicians across party lines and operating through others’ names when necessary. His language repeatedly stresses manipulation, wire-pulling, and backstage leadership.

'Behind the scenes' was also the keynote of their direct influence on current politics during the period covered by the volume.

A second major argument concerns the social conditions that made this influence possible. Hayek finds irony in the fact that the Webbs’ anti-capitalist mission depended on private income, hospitality, leisure, and the informal freedoms of bourgeois society. Their dinners, receptions, and cultivated networks were not incidental; they were political instruments.

It is a curious irony that the circumstances which gave the two people the power to contribute so much towards the destruction of the capitalist civilization which they hated could exist only within that civilization, and that in the type of society for which they hoped no private persons could wield a similar influence towards its change.

The structure of the review moves from admiration for the memoir’s historical value, to analysis of elite persuasion, to the Webbs’ social machinery, and finally to their conception of research and character. Hayek is especially severe when he reaches Beatrice Webb’s “scientific” method. He suggests that investigation and advocacy became inseparable, particularly in the Poor Law Commission, where conclusions preceded evidence.

Certainly, when Mrs. Webb is appointed a member of the Poor Law Commission, strategy and research become curiously intermingled: 'Fortunately, we have already discovered our principles of 1907, and we have already devised our scheme for reform. What we are now manufacturing is the heavy artillery of fact that is to drive both principles and scheme home' (p. 399).

This is the review’s epistemological criticism: Hayek portrays Fabian social science as administrative advocacy clothed in empirical authority. Facts become ammunition for a predetermined scheme. That criticism anticipates his broader attacks on constructivist rationalism, expert planning, and the political misuse of social science.

The closing portrait distinguishes Sidney’s impersonal efficiency from Beatrice’s more passionate authoritarianism. Hayek’s concern is not merely that she favored reform, but that her reforming imagination subordinated individual life to expert collective management.

With her the belief in the ‘wholesale and compulsory management’ by the expert (p. 120), in the ‘“higher freedom” of corporate life’ (p. 222) is a passion, and the dislike of all views, but particularly Gladstonian Liberalism, which ‘think in individuals’, is a real hatred.

The review’s relevance lies in its compressed account of how intellectuals shape political orders: through education, journalism, party networks, administrative reports, and the moral prestige of “science.” Hayek’s judgment is polemical but not dismissive. He sees the Webbs as historically formidable because they understood that governing ideas often prevail before elections do.