12. Review of Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition

12. Review of Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition

August 24, 1961

Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

The besetting problem among all historians is that they tend, inherently and naturally, to favor the institutions or people whom they choose to study—or, rather, that they choose to study that which they favor. This law has applied fully to histories of socialist thought. The unique merit of Alexander Gray’s, The Socialist Tradition³⁰ is that it is the one book in the field that is written from an anti-socialist, rather than a pro-socialist, perspective, and thus provides a healthy and even indispensable offset to the works of [Max] Beer, [G.D.H.] Cole, [Carl] Landauer, et al. Furthermore, many of Gray’s criticisms are trenchant and cogent, and his distinct lack of awe for these socialist thinkers—exhibited by almost all the other writers in the field—is refreshing and proper, because many of the socialist arguments deserve caustic ridicule rather than sober and earnest respect.

Having said this, I must also note disquieting features of the book. While Gray is a good critic, he is hardly a great or very profound one, and he misses many of the important criticisms or aspects of these criticisms. Thus, in writing of the inefficiency of government in business, he unfortunately limits his discussion to the problem of ministerial responsibility or keeping the nationalized industry “out of politics”; there is no mention of the far more important problems of the impossibility of calculation, the loss of profit-and-loss incentive or calculability, etc. Devoting a lot of space to the anarchists, Gray never grasps the vital distinction between the individualist and the collectivist anarchists, and their contrasting attitudes on property, and thus, his discussion, while valuable in many ways, is in an impossible muddle.

But the most unfortunate aspect of Gray’s work is his use of personal ridicule against the socialist and anarchist thinkers discussed. Ridicule against a nonsensical argument is one thing; ridicule against the person, then intertwined with criticism of the argument, is much different and most unfortunate. The personal sneers, to which Gray—a man of obvious wit—is addicted detract, in a scholarly audience, more from the author than the recipient, and properly so.

One glaring example: Karl Marx, a man whom Gray openly dislikes, is savagely attacked for living off Engels all of his life, and, as Gray reiterates, thereby using Engels as his pipeline to reality. Gray berates Marx unmercifully for this “for Reality is precisely the thing that none of us can see through the eyes of another. Marx spent much of his life chewing his intellectual cud, with his back firmly planted towards the window.”

After this unfortunate vulgarity, Gray goes on to attack Marx’s British intellectual followers with the same taint: “In this country at least, Marx has tended to become in the main the cult of a somewhat anaemic intelligentsia, who, like Marx himself, prefer to see reality through the eyes of another.”

If this means anything beyond vulgar bombast, it is dangerously close to the caricature of the conservative American businessman who dismisses all intellectuals or their ideas as people who “have never met a payroll.” In addition to this, the argument is totally irrelevant: for, on Gray’s terms, if Marx hid from reality, Engels most emphatically did not, in fact quite the contrary. (Engels even met a payroll!) So if Marx is to be condemned, then Engels is, in proportion, to be praised; and yet, Engels and Marx had identical views on all questions. The “reality” argument, then, in addition to being ad hominem, is self-contradictory, since it cannot be used against the joint Marx-Engels theory.

This sort of personal assault is by no means the whole of Gray, and, as I have indicated, there is much cogent stuff in the book, and the book is important reading as the only work of its kind in the field. And yet this is a grave limitation on the book. Gray does similar injustice to poor Godwin, whose troubled personal life is held up as an example of the deficiency of rationalism and the life of reason, after which Godwin’s own rationalistic and altruistic anarchism is used, improperly, to describe anarchist theory as a whole. (Contrary to Gray, most anarchists have been irrationalist rather than rationalist in orientation.) Later on, Gray attacks the syndicalists for being irrationalists.

Gray’s own ideological position, which is indicated here and there, in part accounts for the deficiencies of the book. It may be described as very moderately liberal (in the old-fashioned sense), so that at times one wonders whether he dislikes his socialist authors more for their socialism or for their “extreme” devotion to principles. His final paragraphs reveal him gently critical of the British “Road to Serfdom,” but more inclined to try to modify its excesses than to oppose it root and branch.

He also, and peculiarly, seems to believe that the British population is entering upon a decline in number, and that this for some reason calls for rigid statism and central planning. Says Gray: “If we are to get through the years of shrinkage, we shall need a State professing an obligation to exercise a guiding and controlling influence in every sphere of the national life, and prepared to act accordingly.”

When all the deficiencies have been noted, however, it still remains that Gray’s book is the only scholarly history (though it does not claim to be a comprehensive history) of socialist thought from a critical point of view, and this places the book in an important niche for those interested in social philosophy—at least until it is replaced someday by a better book.