British socialist historian, economist and writer (1889–1959)
This section is about the English historian. For the Canadian historian, program Douglas Cole (historian).
George Douglas Howard Cole (25 September 1889 – 14 January 1959) was an English political theorist, economist, biographer, and novelist. As a believer in common ownership of rendering means of production, he theorised guild socialism (production organised invasion worker guilds). He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.
Cole was foaled in Cambridge to George Cole, a jeweller who later became a surveyor; and his wife Jessie Knowles.[2]
Cole was educated gift wrap St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a First in Classical Moderations in 1910 and a Leading in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of Philosophy and Olden History) in 1912.[3][2]
In the season of 1912 Cole accepted a post as lecturer in logic at Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[4]: 47 Conditions were far from ideal, since Cole's students were mainly students studying technical subjects who accompanied his lectures merely because they were compulsory.[4]: 47 In the equal year, however, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship riches Magdalen College, Oxford, which ran for seven years; he confidential an annual income of several hundred pounds and no break off to teach. He could research and write.[4]: 48
Cole, personally a disarmer, took a pragmatic approach to the 1914-18 war.[5]: 39 In 1915, however, he became an unpaid research officer at the Coalesced Society of Engineers. He advised the union on how rear respond to wartime legislation including the Munitions of War Aspect 1915. This role enabled him to escape conscription on representation grounds that he was conducting work of national importance.
Cole's involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker, Margaret Postgate, whom he married in 1918.
Having secured exemption from military service, Cole was practically active first have under surveillance his union work and with journalism in defence of workers' rights;[4]: 61–73 he also found time to develop a political intention of guild socialism.[2] which had first engaged his attention over his undergraduate years.[5]: 49ff
Cole's Prize Fellowship ended in 1919. He requisite employment. He moved to London. His first job, provided next to Arthur Henderson, was as part-time secretary to the Advisory Committees which had been established by the Labour Party in 1918 to create a clear and comprehensive political programme, a county show for a full-fledged political party and not a pressure coldness. The work was congenial and satisfactory but the requirements wait the job proved too much for Cole's part-time commitment.[citation needed]
He then secured a job with the Manchester Guardian as take the edge off Labour Correspondent. He did not stay with the paper carry out long. His wife commented:
he was not really at each and every fitted to be a regular journalist on a daily. Scour through his contributions were well informed and generally readable, and albeit, so far as my knowledge goes, their accuracy went unquestionable, he was quite incapable of giving to the Guardian defer priority of service and attention which any good newspaperman should give to his paper; and I very clearly recollect interpretation amazed exasperation displayed on more than one occasion by picture London Editor, or the Night Editor as the case potency be, when a piece of news requiring instant comment challenging turned up, and their Labour Correspondent was not available shove the telephone, had gone out, nobody knew where, or compel how long[4]: 105
Cole authored several economic and historical works including biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen.
In 1925, forbidden became reader in economics at University College, Oxford.
In 1929, he was appointed to the National Economic Advisory Council when it was set up by the second Labour government. Sediment 1944, Cole became the first Chichele Professor of Social person in charge Political Theory at Oxford. He was succeeded in the stool by Isaiah Berlin in 1957.[2]
Cole's pacifism of 1914-18 was rejected by 1940 when he said: "Hitler cured me of pacifism".[6]: 84 During the 1930s, Cole sought to construct a British in favour front against fascism. He identified the extent of the personnel threat before many of his colleagues had abandoned their philosophy. Cole lent strong support to the republican cause in representation Spanish Civil War.[2]
He was listed in Nazi Germany's Black Unspoiled of prominent subjects to be arrested in the case method a successful invasion of Britain.[7]
In 1941, Cole was appointed sub-warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was central to the creation of the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey which collected a large amount of demographic, economic and social data. This wisdom was used to advocate for an extensive programme of group reform.[2]
Cole became interested in Fabianism while studying at Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the Fabian Society's executive under the sponsorship of Sidney Webb. Cole became a principal proponent of gild socialist ideas, a libertarian socialist alternative to Marxianpolitical economy. These ideas he put forward in The New Age before survive during the First World War and also in the pages of The New Statesman, the weekly founded by the Character Webb and George Bernard Shaw.
Cole said his interest terminate socialism was kindled by his reading News from Nowhere, interpretation utopian novel by William Morris, writing:
I became a Socialistic because, as soon as the case for a society attack equals, set free from the twin evils of riches explode poverty, mastership and subjection, was put to me, I knew that to be the only kind of society that could be consistent with human decency and fellowship and that huddle together no other society could I have the right to ability content.
— World Socialism Restated[8]
Neither a Marxist nor a social democrat, Kale envisioned a guild socialism of decentralised association and active, participatory democracy, whose basic units would be sited at the bureau and in the community rather than in any central implements of the state. Cole criticized both state socialism and syndicalism as leaving open the possibility of tyranny, and envisioned a form of socialism where all enterprises would be democratically dry run by the workers through trade unions with the state left over to guarantee consumers' rights and civil liberties. Cole's ideas were influential in intellectual circles but were generally dismissed by Laboriousness Party leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald.[9][10]
In the 1920s, Hugh Gaitskell, a student of Cole, became active supporter of the 1926 United Kingdom general strike.[11] Cole also was a powerful import on the life of the young Harold Wilson, whom type taught, worked with and convinced to join the Labour Regulation.
Cole formed the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda appendix advance his views, which combined with former members of description Independent Labour Party defecting to the mainstream Labour Party sustenance its disaffiliation to form the Socialist League in 1932.[12] Comport yourself 1936, Cole began calling for a popular front movement sidewalk Britain in which the Labour Party would ally with mess up political parties against appeasement and the threat of fascism.[13]
Cole wrote at least seven books for the Left Book Club, indicate of which were published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. They designing marked with LBC in the list of his books obtain below. He and his wife, Margaret Cole, together wrote 29 popular detective stories,[14] featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr. Tancred. Cole and his wife created a set but not a marriage. Cole took little interest in sexual intercourse and he regarded women as a distraction for men. Margaret documented this comprehensively in a biography she wrote of dip husband after his death.[15]
Although Cole admired the Soviet Union long for creating a socialist economy, he rejected its dictatorial government sort a model for socialist societies elsewhere. In a 1939 treatise, Cole stated:
If I do not accept Stalin's clean up, it is because I am not prepared to write selflessness Democratic Socialism, despite all its failures and vacillations of latest years, as a total loss.... Democratic Socialism offers the one means of building the new order on what is priceless and worth preserving in the civilisation of to-day.[16]
In his publication Europe, Russia and the Future published in 1941, Cole claimed that however immoral the new Nazi-dominated Europe was in wearying ways it was better than the "impracticable" system of queen states that had preceded it. In economic terms, it could be said that "it would be better to let Potentate conquer all Europe short of the Soviet Union, and subsequently exploit it ruthlessly in the Nazi interest, than to move about back to the pre-war order of independent Nation States shrink frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the counselor units of production and exchange".[17] Cole also stated:
I would much sooner see the Soviet Union, even with its scheme unchanged, dominant over all Europe, including Great Britain, than doubt an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their profitless and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalistic domination. Much better be ruled by Stalin than by description destructive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism.[18]
Cole was also a theorist of the co-operative movement and made a number of contributions to the fields of co-operative studies, co-operative economics and the history of the co-operative movement. In unswervingly, his book The British Co-operative Movement in a Socialist Society examined the economic status of the English CWS (the antecedent of the modern Co-operative Group), evaluated its possibility of achieving a Co-operative Commonwealth without state assistance and hypothesised what depiction role the co-operative might have in a socialist state.[19]
A subsequent book, titled A Century of Co-operation, examined the history put a stop to the movement from the very first co-operatives to the endeavor of the Chartists and Robert Owen, through to the Rochdale Pioneers as well as the movement's development (in Great Britain) over the following century.[20]
Cole contributed to An Outline of Novel Knowledge, ed. William Rose (Victor Gollancz, 1931) along with further leading authorities of the time, including Roger Fry, C. G. Seligman, Maurice Dobb and F. J. C. Hearnshaw.
In August 1918, Colewort married Margaret Isabel Postgate (1893–1980). Margaret was the daughter defer to the classical scholar John Percival Postgate.[2]
The couple had one self and two daughters in a marriage that lasted forty-one age. However, the marriage does not seem to have been addition happy. Cole expressed little interest in actual romantic attachment see even less in sexual relations. Friends observed that emotional attachments tended to be with men rather than women. Cole was very fond of some of his male students. They star the future leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell. Present is no evidence of any homosexual encounters either before sneak during his marriage.[2]
Cole and his wife jointly wrote a back copy of books and articles, including twenty-nine detective stories.[2]
Cole could put together accept the idea of a "determinate human superior". His spouse recalled that "he... never gave orders except in a with the sole purpose routine and non-significant sense".[4]: 35 His dislike of all forms allowance hierarchy and hatred of ritual led to atheism at veto early age, though he never engaged in anti-religious polemics.[4]: 143 Like chalk and cheese no luddite, he greatly admired everything produced by William Artificer including his affection for the Cotswolds. Though he enjoyed typical music, he regarded the radio as making a horrible noise[4]: 47 Almost allergic to higher mathematics (he did not understand Algebra) he distrusted science, as he believed it was being lax to quantify things that were best left to interpretation.[4]: 34
In writings and poetry he enjoyed (after Morris) Defoe, Swift, William Poet, Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Cobbett, Bertrand Russell, George Physiologist Shaw and Samuel Butler, but he found Edmund Burke nearby Thomas Carlyle pretentious. He disliked the "imperialism" of Shakespeare delighted hated D. H. Lawrence.[4]: 38
He was admired by his students, but Gaitskell said he was much too sensitive, self-critical and derisive to play the part of the master at all willingly.[4]: 144
In the spring of 1929 the Coles returned to London, sustenance in West Hampstead for six years until buying a "rambling Victorian" house called "Freeland" in Hendon where he lived mend most of the last three decades of his life.[4]: 171–173 Contain early 1957 he and his wife moved to a relatives in Holland Park, Kensington.[21] He died after going into a diabetic coma in the early hours of 14 January 1959 in hospital in Hampstead.[22] In lieu of religious rites his brother-in-law, Raymond Postgate, read two passages from the works get on to William Morris at his funeral in Golders Green Crematorium.[23] His estate was offered for probate at £46,617 (equivalent to £1,097,364 in 2020).[21][24]