Fabianism
FabianismFabianism describes a broad central tendency in English collectivist thinking about social policy which is essentially non-revolutionary, pragmatic, rational, with a belief in government intervention and the perfectibility of the welfare state; it is strongly associated with the English tradition of empirical research. The Fabian Society, founded in 1884 by (among others) Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, took its name from Fabius, a Roman general whose motto was ‘slow but sure’. Avoiding both revolutionary Marxism and Owenite utopianism, the early Fabians embraced a programme of ‘municipal socialism’ and state control of the conditions of labour, to be achieved by the Labour Party with trade-union backing. Political influence was mainly exerted indirectly through marshalling facts in...
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