I WAS reading a book on philosophy and religion by the late Timothy Sprigge (1932-2007), a figure who was fairly unusual in that he was still promoting the comparatively marginalised theories of Absolute Idealism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Discussing one of his philosophical forebears, Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), Sprigge mentions that one hundred years earlier there had been a brief internecine struggle between the Bosanquets and the considerably more well known Webbs. As some of you will recall, Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) and her husband, Sidney Webb (1859-1947), were part of the pernicious Fabian Society that has performed such a sinister role in the socio-economic life of the British Isles.

Ardent socialists, or at least as they perceived the term, the Webbs believed that the state should intervene in the lives of the poor at all levels, going on to praise the Soviet Union and to exert their negative influence on the development of the Labour Party. Whilst they are regularly credited for having contributed to the rise of the welfare state, during the time Beatrice Webb was involved with the Royal Commission on the Poor Law of 1905-09 both she and her husband began to clash with Bernard Bosanquet and his wife, Helen (1860-1925). As a result, they produced entirely separate reports.

The latter, members of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), rejected the economic statism of the Webbs and insisted that a large degree of poverty was down to ‘character defects’ and with more education many people would be able to overcome such hopelessness. The Bosanquets were also of the opinion that free school meals create dependency and that unemployed people with skills should be able to adapt to changing circumstances.

Whilst these views were extremely controversial and inevitably denounced by the Webbs, who eventually broke ranks with their Edwardian counterparts, the Bosanquets were convinced that if you give people a sense of independence they will respond favourably. On the other hand, Bernard’s own Hegelianism led him to suppose that the poor could become part of an organic state in which moral considerations outweighed those of the Webbs and their own attempts to manipulate the country’s most downtrodden people. As Sprigge explains:

“Moral socialism regards us all as members of the state conceived as an organism, who should live their lives as their personal dedication to the goodness of the whole, while economic socialism conceives individuals as mere atoms who must be forced to do what the greatest benefit of the greatest number requires, while easy welfare provisions turn their recipients into parasites upon, rather than living members of, the whole.”

Whilst the Webbs were only ever interested in societal control, there is a degree of truth in what the Bosanquets had to say and yet they did not quite make the leap from a more Hegelian form of socialism to out-and-out Anarchism. In that respect, they should have taken note of Oscar Wilde’s (1854-1900) The Soul of Man Under Socialism, published in 1871, in which he explained that the

“majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

Contrary to the respective moral and economic statism of the Bosanquets and the Webbs, therefore, Wilde champions the kind of natural character-building that the Bosanquets themselves advocated but without the authoritarian coercion that so often accompanies it:

“I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”