G. D. H. Cole


George Douglas Howard Cole was an English political theorist, economist, writer and historian. As a libertarian socialist, he theorised guild socialism. He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.

Early life

Cole was born in Cambridge to George Cole, a jeweller who later became a surveyor; and his wife Jessie Knowles.
Cole was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a double first.

First World War

As a conscientious objector during the First World War, Cole's involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker, Margaret Postgate, whom he married in 1918. The couple both worked for the Fabian Society for the next six years before moving to Oxford, where Cole started writing for the Manchester Guardian.
In 1915, Cole became an unpaid research officer at the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. He advised the union on how to respond to wartime legislation including the Munitions Act. This role enabled him to escape conscription on the grounds that he was conducting work of national importance.
Having secured exemption from military service, during the war years Cole developed a political theory of guild socialism.

Professional life

Cole authored several economic and historical works including biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen.
In 1925, he 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. In 1944, Cole became the first Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was succeeded in the chair by Isaiah Berlin in 1957.
Cole was initially a pacifist, but he abandoned this position around 1938, stating: "Hitler cured me of pacifism". During the 1930s, Cole sought to construct a British popular front against fascism. He identified the extent of the military threat before many of his colleagues had abandoned their pacifism. Cole lent strong support to the republican cause in Spain.
He was listed in the Black Book of prominent subjects to be arrested in the case of a successful invasion of Britain.
In 1941, Cole was appointed sub-warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was central to the establishment of the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey which collected a large amount of demographic, economic and social data. This information was used to advocate for an extensive programme of social reform.

Socialism

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 guild socialist ideas, a libertarian socialist alternative to Marxian political economy. These ideas he put forward in The New Age before and during the First World War and also in the pages of The New Statesman, the weekly founded by the Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw.
Cole said his interest in socialism was kindled by his reading News from Nowhere, the utopian novel by William Morris, writing:
Neither a Marxist nor a social democrat, Cole envisioned a socialism of decentralised association and active, participatory democracy, whose basic units would be sited at the workplace and in the community rather than in any central apparatus of the state.
In the 1920s Hugh Gaitskell was a student of Cole's, becoming his driver during the General Strike of 1926.
In 1936, Cole began calling for a popular front movement in Britain, where the Labour Party would ally with other parties against the threat of fascism.
Cole was a powerful influence on the life of the young Harold Wilson, whom he taught, worked with and convinced to join the Labour Party.
Cole wrote at least seven books for the Left Book Club, all of which were published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. These are marked with LBC in the list of his books given below. He and his wife, Margaret Cole, together wrote 29 popular detective stories, featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr. Tancred. Cole and his wife created a partnership, but not a marriage. Cole took little interest in sex and he regarded women as a distraction for men. Margaret documented this comprehensively in a biography she wrote of her husband after his death.
Although Cole admired the Soviet Union for creating a socialist economy, he rejected its dictatorial government as a model for socialist societies elsewhere. In a 1939 lecture, Cole stated:
In his book Europe, Russia and the Future published in 1941, Cole claimed that however immoral the new Nazi-dominated Europe was, in some ways it was better than the "impracticable" system of sovereign states that had preceded it. In economic terms, it could be said that "it would be better to let Hitler conquer all Europe short of the Soviet Union, and thereafter exploit it ruthlessly in the Nazi interest, than to go back to the pre-war order of independent Nation States with frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the natural units of production and exchange". Cole also stated:

Co-operative studies

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 particular, his book The British Co-operative Movement in a Socialist Society examined the economic status of the English CWS, evaluated its possibility of achieving a Co-operative Commonwealth without state assistance and hypothesised what the role the co-operative might have in a socialist state.
A second book, titled A Century of Co-operation, examined the history of the movement from the very first co-operatives to the contribution of the Chartists and Robert Owen, through to the Rochdale Pioneers as well as the movement's development over the following century.
Cole contributed to An Outline of Modern Knowledge, ed. William Rose along with other leading authorities of the time, including Roger Fry, C. G. Seligman, Maurice Dobb and F. J. C. Hearnshaw.

Personal life

In August 1918, Cole married Margaret Isabel Postgate. Margaret was the daughter of the classical scholar John Percival Postgate.
The couple had one son and two daughters in a marriage that lasted forty-one years. However, the marriage does not seem to have been especially happy. Cole expressed little interest in actual romantic attachment and 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 included the future leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell. There is no evidence of any homosexual encounters either before or during his marriage.
Cole and his wife jointly wrote a number of books and articles, including twenty-nine detective stories.
Cole could not accept the idea of a “determinate human superior” his wife recalled that ”he... never gave orders except in a purely routine and non-significant sense. His dislike of all forms of hierarchy and hatred of ritual led to atheism at an early age, though he never engaged in anti-religious polemics. While no ludite, he greatly admired everything produced by William Morris including his affection for the Cotswolds. Though he enjoyed classical music and derided the radio as “so much noise.” Almost allergic to higher mathematics he distrusted science, as it was being used to quantify things that were best left to interpretation.
In literature and poetry he enjoyed Defoe, Swift William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Cobbett, Bertrand Russell George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Butler, he found Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlisle pretentious. He disliked the “imperialism” of Shakespeare and hated D. H. Lawrence.
He was admired by his students, but Gaitskell said he was much too sensitive, self-critical and sardonic to play the part of the master at all willingly.”
In the Spring of 1929 the Cole’s returned to London, living in West Hempstead for six years until buying a “rambling Victorian” house called “Freeland” in Hendon where he lived for most of the last three decades of his life. In early 1957 he and his wife moved to a flat in Holland Park, Kensington. He died after going into a diabetic coma in the early hours of 14 January 1959 in hospital in Hampstead. In lieu of religious rites his brother-in-law, Raymond Postgate, read two passages from the works of William Morris at his funeral in Golders Green Crematorium. His estate was offered for probate at £46,617.

Non-fiction works