Volume 24, Number 4 · March 17, 1977
Laboring Fabians
By Frank Kermode
The Fabians
by Norman MacKenzie, by Jeanne MacKenzie
Simon and Schuster, 446 pp., $12.95
Nobody can hope to understand modern British politics without some insight into the extremely peculiar structure of the Labor Party; nobody can acquire that insight without looking into the history of the party; and nobody can do that without trying to grasp the part played in it by the Fabian Society, the subject of Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie's book. Any attempt to describe that part briefly is bound to fail, but it might be useful at the outset to state, very provisionally, that in so far as British Labor is nonsocialist and middle-class, inclined to gradualism and the preservation of the mixed economy, it is so in great measure because of its powerful Fabian strain.
Review, 3214 words
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