Friedrich August von Hayek, Review of The Webbs and Their Work (1950)

Hayek’s journal book review assesses Margaret Cole’s commemorative collection as a source for understanding Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s influence on British political thought and policy. Its organizing question is how Fabian gradualism developed into admiration for Soviet communism. Hayek treats this trajectory as a matter of contemporary political importance: reconstructing the Webbs’ intellectual development might explain both the assumptions governing British policy and its possible direction.

Nobody has contributed more to fashion the set of beliefs which governs present British policy than did the two Webbs.

This claim establishes the stakes of an otherwise compact assessment of the collection’s historical value. Hayek proceeds from a criticism of its biographical emphasis to an examination of evidence about the Webbs’ political philosophy, concluding with a proposal for further research. He recognizes the authority of contributors who worked closely with the couple, but argues that their recollections leave the most important formative period insufficiently illuminated: Sidney’s development before his marriage to Beatrice.

The imbalance is both biographical and intellectual. Most essays revisit a life already familiar through My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership. Even accounts of activities principally associated with Sidney leave Beatrice occupying much of the foreground. Hayek interprets this prominence as evidence of the devotion she inspired, while finding that the contributors fail to communicate her personal appeal to readers. His comments on anecdotes about marriage and her selection of possible husbands sharpen this criticism, but his substantive objection concerns the attribution and assessment of intellectual work. The collection contains a chapter on Beatrice as an economist without a corresponding treatment of Sidney’s distinctive scientific contributions.

Against this distribution of attention, Hayek presents Sidney as the more original and productive partner. He identifies him as the actual author of Beatrice’s celebrated Minority Report and, more cautiously, as apparently responsible for much of their jointly published writing. The collection therefore matters to Hayek chiefly where it illuminates Sidney’s career. J. S. Middleton’s account of his role in Labour and the New Social Order supports the review’s unusually strong estimate of his political influence. Leonard Woolf’s chapter on the Webbs’ political thought comes closest, in Hayek’s judgment, to recognizing its significance.

The review’s central conceptual move is to interpret the Webbs’ Soviet allegiance through continuity rather than rupture. Hayek draws attention to Woolf’s assertion that their late conversion followed logically from their fundamental social philosophy, reinforced by Kingsley Martin’s account of Soviet Communism as consistent with their earlier writings. John Parker’s recollection supplies a particularly pointed illustration:

It is revealing to learn from Mr. John Parker that Beatrice Webb once told him “that so long as the Russian Revolution went in for any nonsense like Workers’ Control they had no interest in it. Once Lenin scrapped any element of Workers’ Control in Russia the Webbs began to show some interest in the great Revolution.”

Hayek uses this reported remark to suggest that sympathy for the Soviet system depended less on workers’ participation than on the abandonment of workers’ control. His juxtaposition of it with Cole’s discussion of partisan labour research and R. C. K. Ensor’s account of earlier doubts about the Webbs’ commitment to liberty gives the continuity argument its critical force. These passages suggest that the political preferences behind their Soviet admiration were already present in their earlier outlook. The review does not develop a comprehensive account of Fabian political theory; it identifies evidence that makes its intellectual origins a pressing historical question.

Hayek nevertheless judges the collection indispensable for students of the period’s intellectual and political history. Its value rests on the range of testimony from close associates, even though that testimony cannot substitute for a systematic investigation of Sidney’s formation. His closing proposal turns the volume’s principal limitation into a research agenda:

What is mainly required to fill it would be a study of “The Education of Sidney Webb and the Intellectual Origins of Fabian Essays”.

The distinction is between commemorative recollection and an explanation of how influential beliefs first took shape. Hayek’s review values Cole’s collection for documenting the Webbs’ careers while using its omissions and revealing recollections to press a narrower question: what intellectual formation produced Sidney’s Fabianism, and how did that formation connect gradualist reform with admiration for centralized Soviet power?