G.D.H. Cole: A Socialist and Pluralist

Abstract

The major intellectual contribution of G.D.H. Cole was to Guild Socialism, but after that movement’s collapse in the early 1920s he transferred his allegiance to the Labour Party. During the latter part of his life Cole was established as the pre-eminent Labour intellectual, but was also becoming increasingly restive with parliamentary politics. He agonized about the increase in size of the social unit, criticized the decline of democratic participation and growth of bureaucracy in the trade union and cooperative movements, and lamented the flawed programme of nationalization of the Labour governments of 1945 to 1951. Indeed, G.D.H. Cole continued to identify himself as a Guild Socialist: that is, he was a socialist pluralist, or libertarian socialist, and, perhaps surprisingly, sympathetic to anarchism.