Socialist Humanism and Republican Theory

Abstract

Paradoxically, it was in the party most committed to the expansion of the centralized state from which a new republican conception was to emerge. Struggling to carve out a politics which decisively broke from their past, a group of radical intellectuals were forced to confront a Marxist analysis which still held much of the Left intellectually in thrall. They did so by attempting to rediscover a lost history of radical politics before it had been tainted with Stalinism or settled into a narrow materialism. At the same time as they elaborated a new republican conception of politics, their attempts to connect to the social problems faced by the Labour Movement in an open and critical manner led the problematic of that politics to emerge with a clarity which was not seen elsewhere.