r~f-16 \ ~, c2. 
~, lVHITHER SOCIAUS~I?VALUES 
IN A CHANGINH CIVILISATION" 
AUSTEN ALBU, M.P. 

-SOCIALISM 

AND THE 


STUDY OF MAN 

SECOND IN THE SERIES OF 


FABIAN AUTUMN 
LECTURES, 1950 


FABIAN TltAm' NO. 28:~ • 0~·; SHILLING 


FABIAN 
AIJTIJMN LECTIJBES~ 1950 


Lt~ C 1'UIU~ UE P Ill ~1'S I ~ 1'H I S S tat U~ S 

l. DEMOCRATIC VALUES 
RT. HON. ANEURIN BEVAN, M.P. 

2. SOCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 
AUSTEN ALBU, M.P. 

3. DOES SOCIALISM NEED RELIGION? 
REV. JOHN GROSER 

4. LESSONS 
OF SCIENCE 
DR. J. BRONOWSKI 

5. 
SOCIALIST VALUES IN A CHANGING 
CIVILISATION 
R. H. S. CROSSMAN, M.P. 
TO BE PUBLISHED IN THt~ t~AltLY~IONl'HS Ot' 1951 

Obtainable f"roul 
FABIAN PIJBLICATIONS LTD. 
~~~JIOAtf I DART!IIOIJTH STREET Sll'l 
·~ ''fe..~PH!E'r ~ 

~ Pl.01~7S 
0 e 

~. (.: ~ ~ 

-~'\y./ ~LL_t:C~\~~..~ VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD.

1

'8 -~-}~-14 
HENRIETTA STREET JI'C2 

Clarldie, Lewls 8t Jordan Ltd., 68-70 Wardour Street, W.l. G<!rrard 7242 


SOCIALISM 
AND THE STUDY OF MAN 


Fabian Autumn Lecture, 20th October, 1950 

FOREWORD 


FoR the 1950 series of traditional Autumn Lectures the Executive 
Committee of the Society decided to depart from the practice of 
recent years. It was natural, since the return of the Labour 
Government in 1945, that the Society should have concentrated 
on discussion of some Gf the immediate problems encountered in 
the course of carrying out the policy it had so long advocated. 

The 1950 Lectures were intended to give direction to the 
current re-examination of Socialist thought in the light both of 
experience and new knowledge. The emphasis is therefore on 
political philosophy and sociology rather than on economics and 
administration. The purpose of this lecture was to direct attention 
to the latest developments in the Social Sciences and the lessons 
to be learnt 'from them. 

Aus'l'EN ALnu. 


NOTE.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the 
Fabian Society, represents not the collective view of 
the Society but only the view of the individual who 
prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is 
limited to approving the publications which it issues 
as worthy of consideration within the Labour 
Movement. 

January, 1951. 

a: Jord&D Ltd , -70 taour Stre t, W. , 

SOCIALISII AND THE STUDY OF MAN 


AUSTEN ALBU, M.P. 

1. HISTORICAL 
(i) The Growth of Utilitarianism 
To the river of Socialist thought and inspiration many streams 
have contributed. It is not my purpose to-night to argue the relative 
contributions of Marx and Methodism, of Empiricism and Theory. 
In order, however, to understand the background against which 
our present thinking must be done it is necessary to remind ourselves 
of the influences which have been successively brought to 
bear on Socialist ideas in the last 150 years. 

Modern Socialism was the natural inheritor in the industrial 
age of ancient feelings of revolt against conditions of tyranny and 
inequality that were as old as history. In some of its early forms 
it attempted hopelessly to stem the tide of industrialisation and 
proletarianisation which was advancing so rapidly with the growth 
of machinery. Once the industrial revolution was completed it 
became the vehicle for the feelings of hatred and frustration 
generated by that social upheaval in its victims. In a recent series 
of broadcast lectures/ Canon Demant has reminded us of the 
enormous shock given to the social system by the sudden expansion 
of laisser-faire capitalism in the nineteenth century, and he 
has reminded us that as a form of social organisation it is an 
abnormality in history and that its life-for it is already in 
universal decline-has been extremely short. At no previousperiod in history had religious sanction been given to the principles 
that economic life was the operation of natural, Divine law, and 
that the relationship between man and man should be left to the 
making of individual economic contracts. 

It was the belief, held most strongly by the Puritans, that it 
was man's duty to allow the laws of nature freely to operate, and 
that it was therefore encumbent on him to understand them, that 
led first to the great advances in discovery in the physical sciences 
of the seventeenth century and then to the attempt to find similar 
laws for man's behaviour in the nineteenth. The Benthamite 
school, with its basic principle that man's actions are determined 
by his rational attempt to increase pleasure and diminish pain, 
provided the explanation of the working of God's will and appeared 
to support with the authority of science the political and economic 


AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

developments of the time. In the words of Sidney Webb's Fabian 
Essay : " Utilitarianism became the Protestantism of Sociology." 

It was against this pseudo-science, based entirely on theoryand deductive reasoning, that Marx brought his powers of argument 
and research. The first part of the Communist Manifesto 
was an attempt to explain what was happening in sociological terms 
and when, twenty to thirty years later, Das Kapital appeared, the 
arguments were supported by a wealth of detailed factual material 
obtained either by personal observation or from the increasingnumber of reports of Committees and Royal Commissions that 
the miseries of the industrial revolution had brought into being. 
Whether or not the workers understood the theory of surplus value 
or dialectical materialism, here was a description of the life that 
they experienced and an explanation of the break up of traditional 
human relations which they could understand. Whatever the 
theories that Marx derived from his work and whatever the mythsthat have been built on them since, he started the process of debunking 
the classical economists by an examination of the 'facts 
that has been the backbone of Socialist thinking ever since. It 
was this empirical approach that distinguished the Fabian contribution 
to British Socialism-but the early Fabians soon gave up the 
attempt to produce general theories about human actions and tried 
to apply their knowledge to immediate problems. 

From the beginning, however, they had been opposed to the 
' rabble hypothesis ' : the view of society as a mass of unrelated, 
self-seeking, individuals; a view which, as Elton Mayo has pointed 
out, owed most to Ricardo, whose main experience of the motives 
of human action was the seven years he spent in a stockbroker's 
office between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one.2 Sidney Webb 
wrote that " . . . a society is something more than an aggregateof so many individual units ... it possesses existence distinguishable 
from those of its many components." The Fabians, therefore, 
strove to restore the sense of community which had been destroyed 
by the industrial revolution and, for this purpose, it was to the 
State that they mainly looked. 

Meanwhile, the advance of political democracy and individual 
liberty under the influence of the liberal philosophy o'f the age 
had ensured that the British Labour movement was resistent to 
totalitarian solutions, and British Socialism appeared as the child 
of the conflict between Individual Freedom and Social Order. 

The end of the nineteenth century saw a great advance in the 
study of social conditions, the very exposure of which undetmined 
the self-confidence of the defenders of capitalism themselves. The 
methods employed and the conclusions drawn, however, continued 
to be based on the assumption adopted by the Utilitarians, that 
man's actions were taken for rational reasons. The warnipgs of 
tbe French Sociologists, Le Play and Durkheim1 who drew atten-

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SOCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

tion to the effects of the social disruption of industrial society on 
the psychological satisfactions and personal relationshi~s of community 
life, were fittle known. Graham \Vallas, in h1s brilliant 
book "Human Nature in Politics," uttered an unheeded warning 
against the effects of the growth of political institutions based 
on intellectualist assumptions about human thought and rnoti ves, 
and drew attention to the harmful effects of separating the study 
of politics from the study of human nature. He complained that 
sociology had had little influence on political science, and pointed 
out the dangers that arise in modern mass society from the use 
by politicians of non-rational arguments when dealing with issues 
beyond the direct experience of their hearers; explaining the process 
of non-rational inference, based on the psychological association 
of ideas, by means of which these arguments come to be 
accepted. Practically no further Socialist thinking took placealong these lines until Evan Durbin published his "Politics of 
Democratic Socialism " in 1939. 

(ii) Fasciilm and the Irrational 
The warnings of Graham Wallas prepared the grour.d for 
the final blow to nineteenth century rationalism and the vindication 
of its critics, which was delivered by the rise to powerof the irrational, obscurantist movement known as Fascism. 
Succeeding first in two of the apparently most civilised countries 
in the very heart of the rational world, one of them preeminent 
in the physical sciences, and finding a not inconsiderable 
following in many others, Fascism was bound to give an enormous 
impetus to the study of individual and social psychology. As the 
Fascist regimes consolidated their internal support against little 
open or underground opposition, it became clear that the facile 
early explanations that they were dictatorships of capitalists maintained 
solely by brute force were inadequate, and research workers 
turned to a study of the real feelings of men and women in the 
insecure world of the inter-war years. In particular, several studies 
of unemployment in Great Britain and in the United States and 
the classical investigation of a community o'f unemployed, made 
in Marienthal by a group of social psychologists from Vienna 
University, brought out not only the physical but also the psychological 
effects of prolonged unemployment. The breakdown of 
normal standards of domestic planning; the lack of interest in 
social and political institutions; the loss of any sense of time, which 
these studies disclosed, drew attention to the large part played in 
any society by commonly accepted values and modes of behaviour 
and so threw light on the question of incentives and motivation. 

The advantage which these research workers of the 1930's 
had over their predecessors of the turn of the century was in the 


AUTUMN u;:cTURES 1950 

g-reat progress made in the science of psychology, due very largely 
to the psycho-analytical theories of Freud based on a large number 
of clinical case studies. It was Freud's work which demonstrated 
the great importance o'f the subconscious, and proved that it is 
possible to discover the causes of apparently irrational emotions. 
After Freud no serious student of human relations could neglect 
those latent causes of human behaviour, which were none the less 
real a~d powerful because they appeared to be irrational. 

2. ADVANCE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 
(i) The New Sociology 
Freud, however, dealt with the individual, and there was a danger 
that, in the enthusiasm for the new theories, his followers would 
parallel in the field of psychology the errors of the political economists 
and develop a view of human nature built up entirely on a 
study of isolated individuals. Some may certainly have done so; 
but our knowledge of society and of men's behaviour within it 
has been greatly increased by the considerable advances made in 
recent years in other branches of the social sciences. The branch 
of the social sciences which deals with the development of human 
relations and organisation in their broadest aspects is sociology. 
In the past sociologists have dealt mostly with institutions, and 
these they have studied from documents or 'from written material. 
In other words, being concerned with the knowledge possessed by 
a tiny minority, their conclusions were coloured by an intellectual 
interpretation of phenomena. There has developed, however, 
chiefly in America, a sociology, based on the study of widely held 
opinion, which deals with the masses. The older, European,
sociology is concerned with expressed ideas ; the American, with 
emotions and generally inarticulate opinions. The growth of this 
newer empirical branch of sociology has begun to expand our 
understanding of social relations which were previously almost 
entirely the field of speculation and deduction. As soon as one 
starts real research into the facts of human behaviour one is 
brought up immediately against the major fact of the infinite variety 
of human characteristics and the institutions built on them. Deduct;
ons made from hypotheses assumed to be valid for all human 
beings; such as that human beings will always act in their own 
self interest; that children always love their parents; that the teaching 
of the Bible makes people more religious; that all Englishmen 
love animals; that the possibility of increased profit 'for the owners 
of shares in public joint stock companies is an incentive to greater 
efficiency, are found to be quite insufficient. Their place is more 
and more being taken by exact observation of a representative 

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S.OCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

number of persons or units, and the analysis of the results by 
statistical methods. 

It is, in fact, the great advance in the use and method of 
statistical science that has enabled us to present the varied picture 
of man's behaviour in a comprehensible form. Already at the 
beginning of the century Graham Wallas was drawing attention 
to the fact that the quantitative study of facts was taking the 
place of reasoning from a priori assumptions in the preparationof new legislation. He quoted the difference between the Poor 
Law C0mmission in 1833, whose conclusions were deduced 'from 
Benthamite principles, and that of 1905, which collected and considered 
a vast amount of data on the factors which made people 
paupers and which affected the way they behaved. These methods 
have made considerable advance; but the enormous gap in our 
knowledge of social conditions. at the beginning of the war is 
brought out very forcibly in R. M. Titmuss's " Problems of Social 
Policy," published as the second volume of the official history of 
the war. 

(ii) Sample Surveys 
Physical characteristics are, obviously, the simplest on which to 
collect figures, and it is only in recent years that the statistical 
method has been brought to bear on the more complex features of 
human nature. The collection of the material for such analyses 
must involve finding out from individuals facts about aspects of 
their behaviour, which they do not normally remember or which, 
because it is, or is thought to be, in contravention of law or custom, 
they are unwilling to disclose. An example o'f the first is the 
detailed weekly expenditure of a family; and of the latter the 
subject-matter of the Kinsey Report. When the information 
required is about opinions, then the problem becomes much greater. 
Most people do not normally express their thoughts in words, 
and their replies to questions are likely to be greatly influenced 
by the way the question is phrased, the personality or views, if 
known, of the questioner or the temporary emotions of the personreplying. It is for this reason that exaggerated attempts to predict 
public opinion have brought discredit on some methods of opinionsurvey such as the Gallup Poll. The fact that these methods of 
enquiry are sometimes badly done or misused does not, however, 
detract from their great value when carried out under strictlyscientific conditions, with trained interviewers, and without undue 
claims being made for their results. They are becoming increasingly 
used, in the form of market research, by commercial undertakings, 
and then form the basis o'f production planning for the 
individual factory. They were greatly developed during the war 
by the wartime Social Survey, which made studies not only of 


AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

aspects of public opinion and morale, but also of such directly 
practical issues as the needs of famil;cs for clothing and household 
goods on which rationing and production policies were based. 
Similar enquiries were made by the Ministry of Food to find out 
exactly what people in each part of the country and in every class 
were eating. Since the war, the Social Survey has been established 
within the Central Office of Information, as a permanent piece of 
Government machinery. The Survey now makes a regular monthly 
survey of sickness to fill a gap in our statistics to which attention 
had frequently been called. The value of information of this kind, 
on which to base the administration of the National Health Service 
and any legislative changes that may appear necessary, is obvious. 
The Survey was used to study the effects of changes in clothes 
rationing and, as a result, the Board of Trade was able, successfully, 
to make the decision to end it. Similar enquiries into domestic 
fuel consumption have shown the Ministry of Fuel and Power 
that it would be dangerous to aboli sh the present system of coal 
allocation. If only the Ministry of Food had used the Surveylast year they would have learnt that the conditions did not exist 
in which sweets rationing could be abolished. 

For some time the Survey has been making enquiries into 
detailed fields of consumer expenditure. This is done by obtaining 
particulars from housewives in a scientifically selected sample of 
their weekly expenditure on different items in the family budget. 
The last survey of this type was that made by the Ministry of 
Labour in 1937-38, and that only covered so-called working-class 
households. It is on the basis of the weight of different items in 
working-class expenditure re-;ealed by that enquiry that the present 
Retail Price Index is based. A revision of the basis of that index 
is certainly overdue, but that is not the only reason for undertaking 
continuous surveys of this type. The foundation of economic 
planning in the field of consumer goods is missing if we have no 
knowledge of the pattern of consumer demand and the way it 
changes for different commodities as family incomes rise and fall. 

Unfortunately there is an unwillingness in some Government 
departments to recognise the value of this form of research as a 
basis for administrative action. This is partly due to the belief 
that the department can obtain the information required from its 
own sources, although these are generally much more cumbersome 
if they are not insufficient; but also to the continuance in the outlook 
of Senior Civil Servants of that deductive theoretical approach 
to problems which Graham Wallas condemned and which is the 
result of their education and methods of selection. 

(iii) Social Anthropology 
Sample surveys, in spite of the publicity they receive, are 
not the only, or even the main, new research technique that sociolo


\_;1 nare, LeWJS at Joroan .a.,ta., ts~-10 waraour Street, W.l. Gerrard 7242 


SOCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

gists have developed in this century; nor are statistical enquiries, 
by themselves, sufficient to produce new hypotheses on human 
behaviour. They will, however, generally be required to validate 
such hypotheses. The reason for this is the impossibility of conducting 
in this field the controlled experiments which are the means 
of proving hypotheses, and so of developing new theories, in the 
natural sciences. In a controlled experiment it is possible to isolate 
the effects of certain conditions and to observe the effects of changes , 
in others. Statistical analyses, either of all the material being 
investigated, or of representative samples of it, are the alternative 
in the social sciences to the controlled, laboratory experiment. The 
uselessness of conducting laboratory experiments for the development 
of theories of human behaviour was finally demonstrated 
twenty-five years ago in the famous experiments conducted by 
Elton Mayo and his colleagues from the Harvard School of Business 
Administration. Mayo was an anthropologist, some of the 
members of his team were psychiatrists. They were called in to 
assist the engineers of the Western Electric Company of America, 
who were trying to find out the effect of illumination on productivity 
at their Hawthorne Works. The experiments were being 
conducted on a group of girls carrying out a simple assembly 
operation, and for this purpose they were installed in an experimental 
test room. The results were inconclusive until the attemptwas made to secure the active co-operation of the girls, and after 
some changes had been made in the group. After that the conditions 
of work were changed, one at a time, and the results were 
observed. Rest periods were introduced; shorter hours of work; 
free snacks in the morning break. Output rose and the girls seemed 
happier. After twelve weeks of this the conditions of work were 
reversed and all these privileges abolished. To the surprise of 
the research workers, output remained as high as ever. It was 
only then that they realised what should have been so obvious : 
the workers were human; they were not being bawled out by a 
foreman all the time; they were being consulted and treated as 
individuals ; they were interested in the experiment; the group 
itself had become an important factor and within it there was 
informal leadership. This led to much further work in which 
very large numbers of workers were interviewed and their opinions 
recorded and analysed, this time with the aid of statistical methods. 
As a result, consider::tble changes were made in the methods of 
management and supervision; the training of 'foremen ; the services 
provided for employees and so on. Much of this has become 
common practice in progressive firms, and much of the results of 
the experiment has been mis-interpreted and used as the basis for 
phoney ideas. Its importance lay not so much in what it disclo~d 
as the lesson it taught of the difficulty of relating cause and effect 
in human actions. It did, however, draw attention to the import



AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

ance of the small and often informal group in any organisation;
a matter to which the macrocosmic view of human beings as a mass 
of atomised individuals would not have led and which overall 
statistical surveys would not disclose. 

The connection between this anthropological method of investigation 
in order to develop hypotheses and the statistical 
validation of them was demonstrated in a war-time investigation 
into absenteeism in the California aircraft industry. The numbers 
employed in these war-time plants were enormous-40-50,000and 
most of the workers were newcomers to the district. When 
statistics of the absentees in each plant were divided up into categories 
according to the number of times each worker wns absent, the 
usual pattern was found. A comparatively large number was absent 
a large number of times ; a similar number was absent a veryfew times; and between the two there were smaller numbers of 
people absent a varying number of times. Examinations of the 
figures for each department of perhaps a thousand or two workers 
gave the same results; but when, in accordance with hypotheses 
based on the behaviour of small groups in previous experiments, 
the figures were broken down to the level of small sections of 
workers in daily contact with each other a very different pattern 
emerged. Some groups consisted mostly of those with good attendance 
records; some chiefly of those with large numbers of absences 
per year. It was clear, therefore, that the morale of these factories 
was based not on individual propensities, but on group characteristics; 
and further study showed the part played by leadership, 
formal or informal, within the groups. 

The anthropological method of studying behaviour and institutions 
in advanced societies owes much to those modern anthropologists 
who have had the advantage of studying primitive 
societies in the light of modern psychological knowledge. The 
primitive society, little touched by machine civilisation, is sufficiently 
small-scale to be completely comprehensible by the observer, 
and almost forms a substitute for laboratory experiment. The 
social anthropologists can not only study the great variety of 
patterns in which human beings can organise their communal lives, 
some leading to greater, others to less, satisfaction and happiness;
but can also, in the light of present understanding of the effects of 
environment and upbringing in infancy on personality and temperament, 
trace the causation of social attitudes and customs in the 
societies they are studying and provide clues to useful lines of 
research in more complex communities. The social anthropologist, 
as Margaret Mead has written, goes "... to primitive societies to 
find material beyond which society cannot deny man's biological 
inheritance and also to find variations in human behaviour that 
vre might not otherwise be able even to imagine as possibilities."' 

There are few opportunities in modern society for the purely 

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SOCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

anthropological method to produce conclusive results; it can only 
do so when dealing with small face-to-face groups; that is to say 
groups with whom the investigator can come in daily and intimate 
contact. More usually the results of this method are generalpictures without conclusions, but pin-pointing facets of behaviour 
that need more detailed research. Examples are the studies by the 
Lynds of an American small town, published under the names of 
" Middletown " and " Middletown in Transition "; the study of 
"Race and Caste in a Southern Town" by J. Dollard; and the 
rather less scientific studies undertaken by Tom Harrisson and 
Mass Observation in this country. 

There is, however, an extension of the anthropological method 
which has been used by some social-psychologists and which went 
originally by the name of " functional penetration"; but which 
seems, in America, to have become known as "participant observation." 
This was the method employed in the Austrian study of an 
unemployed town which I have already mentioned, and it was also 
used in an extremely interesting, but unfortunately unpublished 
study, undertaken by Dr. Marie Jahoda, of the Production Subsistence 
scheme in South Wales. This was a community scheme 
under which unemployed miners worked 'for nothing on material 
provided for them and were able to buy the results of their labour 
for the cost of the material. The results of this research brought 
out certain very interesting facts about incentives and motives 
and their relation to social environment and culture. The method 
employed in these studies is for a research worker, or preferably 
a team of workers, to enter the community being studied and 
actively to participate in its life. In this way, after a time, it is 
possible to overcome the normal effect of the personality of the 
research worker on the people being studied and to make observations 
of behaviour under normal conditions. Behind this method 
is again the concept that, in human behaviour, the whole is more 
than an addition of its parts; a melody is more than the attributes 
of its isolated notes; a family is more than j~st Mr. and Mrs. John 
and Mary. What is added is not a mystical group mind but the 
relationships o'f the constituent elements to each other. 

A more recent adaptation of these anthropological methods, 
with a more specifically psychiatric approach, goes by the name of 
group dynamics and is used in this country by the Tavistock 
Institute of Human Relations. The Institute has been undertaking 
a lengthy study, of which a first report is shortly to be published, 
on industrial relations in the Glacier Metal Company, an engineering 
factory of about 2,000 employees. The Institute is also associated 
with studies being undertaken in two London boroughs by 
the Family Welfare Association into the much neglected field of 
family relations. The methods, which are similar to those employed 
in clinical work, reeemble a form of group psycllo-analysis ; in 


12 

AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

the course of which tensions and conflicts between members of the 
group and between the group and outsiders are brought out into 
the open; examined for their causes and, if possible, released. It 
is hoped that these case studies will yield useful data on the nature 
of the behaviour of people when associated for any purpose; but 
the method is still in a crude and early form, and already it has 
received more publicity than its results to date warrant or its 
practitioners desire. Clinical work in large organisations can also 
be carried out by balanced teams of different sorts of scientists 
such as physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, economic statisticians, 
engineering technologists, working together and each looking 
at the same problem in the light of his own knowledge and 
experience. This is the method that became known during the 
war as operational research. Properly used it can be of greatassistance to the administrators of large organisations and, as in 
all types of case work, it often leads to conclusions that can be 
proved generally valid. It is this type of research that ought to be, 
but so far is not, general in all large industrial concerns, including 
the nationalised industries. 

(iv) The Future of the Social Sciences 
It will be seen, as Professor Sargant Florence has recently shown, 
that there are clearly recognisable patterns emerging to-day in 
social research! First, it integrates several branches of the social 
sciences. Secondly, it follows the research procedure of hypothesisleading to factual study leading to theory, which is normal to the 
natural sciences. And thirdly, it lends itself to operational research; 
that is to say research directed to the solution of specific problems 
encountered in current practice. The extraordinary thing is, as 
Florence points out, that the vitally important subject of economics 
has not, in general, follo wed this pattern; but remains isolated, 
based largely on deductive reasoning and, as a consequence, is 
useless in the solution of current problems. lt was about time 
that this was said by someone, him elf a social scientist, with 
authority in academic circles. It is frankly alarming that, at a time 
when we are more and more trying to control the economic conditions 
of our existence, the branch of learning (I cannot call it 
a science) which should contribute most to our understanding of 
the problems involved should be mainly taught in our universities 
as a philosophic and theoretical exercise; and that its students 
should never be encouraged to go out into the field they are supposed 
to be studying and, by observation and analysis, test the hypotheses 
from which their elaborate theories, and even more elaborate mathematical 
equations and curves are deduced. Unfortunately, few 
even of our Socialist economists recogni!e the futility of policiesdeveloped on no stronger basis of knowledge of the behaviur 

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~OCIALISM AND 'l'HE STUDY OF MAN 

of individuals and institutions than satisfied the Utilitarians of 
the last century. Some of them seem to conceive the task of 
Socialism as the destruction of the barriers without which they 
imagine that the free play of economic forces, acting in conformity 
with a human nature they have never studied, would automatically 
produce the greatest sum of material advantage; a result which, 
by itself, would be neither Socialism nor a guarantee of human 
happiness. Some of them, after a wistful glance at their theories, 
are falling back on commonsense. If it were not for the practical 
experience gained by many university economists in wartime 
administration we should never have been as successful in our 
economic affairs as, in fact, we have been over the last five years. 

I do not want to give the impression that the Social Sciences 
in general are very far advanced, or that they have yet produced 
many theories which are generally accepted by all who call themselves 
Social Scientists in the way that theories are accepted in 
physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser degree, in biology. The typesof study comprised in the Social Sciences have not, in many cases, 
got past the position of the Natural Sciences in the seventeenth 
century, but they are making progress and, with the experience of 
the Natural Sciences to guide them, and with the development of 
the statistical method and of psychological knowledge, they may, 
given sufficient encouragement, advance very rapidly indeed. There 
is, however, a reluctance to grant them a place in the academic 
sun, especially in this country. The Government has made some 
money available, both through the University Grants Committee 
and, for studies in Industrial Relations, through the Medical 
Research Council on the advice of the Schuster Panel of the 
Cabinet Committee on Productivity. There seems some doubt 
whether these specific grants will be continued, and, meanwhile, 
the opposition of the older established faculties and the dispute 
between the theoretical and empirical schools of sociology is preventing 
the growth of Social Science studies on anything like the 
scale needed. 

Part of the resistance to field research work comes, of course, 
from the resistance that any body of people puts up to having their 
habits studied. This may take the form of not wishing to disclose, 
even in confidence, one's innermost feelings about one's little 
brother or sister, or a quite rational desire, on the part of the 
managing director of a company, or of the secretary of a trade 
union, not to disclose the extent to which his actions are controlled 
by those who, in theory, appointed him. It is one of the tasks of 
sociologists to develop techniques and codes of professionalbehaviour to overcome this resistance and the fear on which it is 
based. Another of the difficulties which prevent the findings of 
social research from being fully utilised when policy is beingformulated or administrative decisions taken is the difficulty of 


14 AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

communicating its results in a way which can be readily grasped 
and, when they appear contrary to popular beliefs, as they often 
do, freely accepted. Politicians in particular are prone to think 
that they know best what the public thinks and wants, and the 
substitution of scientific analysis for the politician's "hunch " produces 
a conflict similar to that which occurs when the hospital-
trained doctor starts taking the place in the tribe of the local 
medicine man. 

3. 'fHE LESSONS OF SO~IAL RESEAR~H 
(i) Exaggerated Claims 
There are some people who believe that the advance in knowledge 
of human behaviour and human emotions will lead to the point 
where all political decisions can be automatically decided on the 
basis of the ascertainable facts. This, I believe, to be a totalitarian 
heresy. It arises out of the failure to recognise the variety of 
forms in which society can be organised so as to provide both 
political stability and a mass contentment equivalent to happiness. 
I should also point out in passing that it presumably involves the 
choice of happiness as the absolute goal of human activity. Anypolitical decision, even i'f founded on the fullest information and 
understanding of the latent feelings and desires of the people, must 
involve an acceptance of one set of values rather than another. 
The social scientist who claims that decisions taken on his conclusions 
need involve no value judgment is merely mistaking the 
system of values which he has accepted for an absolute truth. This 
is the thinking that leads to totalitarianism. 

For instance, it is quite possible to imagine a form of society 
in which there were rigid class divisions, but in which everybody 
was made to feel contented by every device of subtle propaganda 
and psychological manipulation. Provided this society was wealthyenough to provide everybody with a good standard of living, men 
and women living in it might well feel that they were happy. Most 
of us would not consider this a desirable society. This is, in fact, 
the very danger that the growth of sociological knowledge creates 
when it puts at the disposal of power'ful groups of men the means 
to manipulate other men's thoughts and feelings. In the United 
States, for example, there has been a great development of what 
the American trade unions call " cow-sociology " because its purpose 
is to induce in the worker the cow-like mentality of acceptance. 
This is based on considerable research, following the work of 
Elton Mayo, on the subconscious urges and desires of industrial 
workers ; as if, to quote the American sociologist, Robert Merton, 
they alone were " . . . subject to pre-occupations, obsessive reveries, 

\.i&anace. ~wts a ..1oro.an ~ta. , oa-·1u waraour :;treet. W.l. oerrar<1 7242 


SOCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MA N l.S 

defects and distortions of attitude, and irrational dislikes of eoworkers 
or supervisors."~ In countries where there is a greatconcentration of economic power, as there is in the United States, 
the new techniques based on sociological knowledge can be used 
primarily for the purpose of ensuring that the will of the managers 
is accepted by the workers in their factories and by the people at 
large. Too many sociologists, especially in America, have accepted 
the view that it is their business to assist the maintenance of existing 
social systems and to eliminate all forms of conflict in existing 
organisations. It is a form of infantilism to believe that conflict 
can be eliminated in human activity. What the sociologists and 
social-psychologists can do is to enlarge the area of rational thought 
and make clearer the part which the apparently irrational plays 
in people's attitudes. In this way they can assist in making the 
inevitable conflicts in society more about real things and less the 
symptoms of hidden emotions. There has been a tendency to treat 
all forms of revolt as deviations from the normal, whereas in most 
societies the refusal to accept existing conditions is, for large 
numbers of people, far more likely to be psychologically normal 
than the reverse. Sociologists need to devote far more attention 
to social dynamics : the mechanics by means of which desired social 
changes can be achieved with the minimum of 'friction. All this 
involves the very highest standards of integrity in those who work 
in these fields; both because of the temptations to which they are 
particularly likely to be exposed and also because of the difficulty 
in checking their conclusions at the present stage of the development 
of knowledge. The scientific integrity that is required is 
that implied in the statement that "... a good half of most research 
consists in an attempt to prove yourself wrong. Intellectual honesty 
is discouraged by politics, religion or even courtesy." That was 
written by J. B. S. Haldane in 1927.6 There is also needed a sense 
of professional responsibility by which it will be no more possible 
for the social scientist to subject the characteristics of those he 
studies to exposure or attack than it is for the doctor to disclose 
the medical history of his patient. 

(ii) Lessons for Socialists 
When we ask ourselves what Socialists can learn from the results 
to date of the objective study o'f human behaviour, we should first 
remind ourselves that most humanistic thinking, as the Webbs 
pointed out in " Methods of Social Study," has tended to confuse 
facts with intentions, and this applies equally to Socialist thought. 
All men are not born equal ; although it is the intention of the 
constitution of the United States that they shall be given equal 
opportunity. It is obvious that the dictatorship of the proletariat 
will not lead to the withering away of the State. It leads instead 


16 AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

to the managerial society, and this is likely to remain unless an 

active group of people set out with the purpose of changing it. 

Neither nationalisatiol), municipalisation nor co-operation leads to 

a sense of common purpose in an enterprise unless measures are 

taken to bring it into being. Humanistic ideas were derived from 

the liberal view of the inevitability of progressive change, and 

this change was associated with man's increasing technological 

advance and control over his environment. Any change which 

appeared to increase this material power was, there'fore, welcomed 

without consideration of other factors which might be affected by 

it. But the truth is that every institution in society not only serves 

for the performance of its obvious function, but also satisfies 

other communal needs not capable of immediate perception.

Malinowski showed that for a primitive race the co-operative task 

of building a canoe served not only the obvious technical functwn, 

but also that of establishing and reinforcing inter-personal relations. 

In the Hawthorne experiment, to which I have already referred, 

the main discovery was of the secondary effects of taking a group 

of girls into collaboration in an experiment on the effects of physical

changes on production. Sociologists, borrowing a psycho-analytical 

concept, re'fer to these two levels as the manifest and latent func


tions of an institution or relationship, and it is the distinctive 

contribution of the modern sociologist to study both of them 

together. The existence of these latent functions imposes limitations 

on the possibility of changes in existing institutions, failure to 

consider which is the hall mark of Utopianism. In the words of 

Robert Merton, "To seek social change, without due recognition 

of the manifest and latent functions performed by the social organi


sation undergoing change, is to indulge in social ritual rather than 

social engineering .. . Any attempt to eliminate an existing social 

structure without providing adequate alternative structures for 

fulfilling the functions previously 'fulfilled by the abolished organi


sation is doomed to failure." 7 It is these new conceptions of the 

functions of the elements of which society is composed that have 

led to an understanding of the important part played by groups 

of people, whether organised formally or informally. Liberal 

thought developed with the growth of the nation-state and its 

insistence on individual liberty overlooked the important role 

played by group relationships in previous societies. Those who 

have seen modern civilisation as a process of disintegration have 

drawn the comparison between the modern state as a community 

of individuals and the clan as a community of groups. The State 

by itself cannot restore that sense of community which market 

economy nearly destroyed by treating people only as individuals. 

We have always accepted the existence o'f overt groups whether 
natural, such as the family, or voluntary, such as trade unions, 
clubs and political parties : but we have overlooked the informal 

"'•-•••u.-c, ;&JII:WIIf • oo~u&·ua.u ~~;u.., oo-tu vva-raour -:ftreet, w.l.. 


S.OCIALISM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

groups which form in the work place and the local community. 
Certainly the right of voluntary membership of formal groups is 
basic for democratic Socialism, and its absence in Russia may 
become the most potent source of disintegration · in the Soviet 
regime: but the institutional forms of such larger groups must 
correspond as nearly as possible to the latent functions of the 
informal groups on which tl1ey are based. There is no doubt that, 
in the past, one of the latent functions of trade unions was to act 
as a vehicle for the normal aggressive emotions of groups of 
workers in our industrial society. There is a danger that in performing 
only their representative functions in the planning state 
they are frustrating these feelings in their members which will 
find a less constructive outlet. The transfer of functions from 
small local authorities to county councils or central departments 
may be an administrative convenience and appear conducive to 
greater efficiency, but what are its effects on the communal relationships 
on which the stability of society ultimately rests? 

Only recently has the State begun seriously to consider the 
family as a group worth protecting and assisting. This is in direct 
contravention of some earlier Socialist views, including those of 
Graham Wallas himself who, in his Fabian essay, anticipated the 
lessening of the internal coherence of family life and its absorption 
by society. Family allowances and social services have begun to 
substitute the criterion of income according to group need for 
income according to the value of the individual; but we know little 
about the way to assist good family relationships. What we do 
know is that those relationships have a profound effect on the 
young child and so on the psychology of the adult and on his 
irrational attitudes, as frequently displayed in the institutions of 
which he forms part. The Socialist philosophy envisages the 
spread of democratic behaviour through every aspect of communal 
life; but experience has taught us that such behaviour is only 
possible from balanced, democratic personalities. 

What chance has the average person to develop such a 
personality? He starts li'fe at the whim of anxious parents who 
know little of the psychological effects upon him of their behaviour. 
He goes to school in classes the size of which makes inevitable the 
use of authoritarian methods by his teachers, and he passes into 
adult life either in the army or in an industry managed on authoritarian 
lines. 

For Socialists the important point is that good group relationships 
starting with the family are democratic, co-operative relationships 
: relationships of self-abnegation and mutual help, involving 
freely accepted leadership: the individual relationships of the 
Utilitarians were competitive relationships based on the primacy 
of self-interest which had to be controlled by imposed authority. 

Canon Demant has emphasised the important part played by 


18 AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

the social disciplines and group relationships surviving from the 
feudal era in easing the drastic change to the capitalist market 
economy. Capitalism reaches its most serious crisis when these 
disciplines have been destroyed by Utilitarian rationalism. It may 
even be that trusts and price-fixing associations, in addition to 
their open and anti-social purposes, as well as the so-called restrictive 
practices of the trade unions, owe something to the subconscious 
recollection of a society of order and the just price, and 
that this has prevented European capitalism from reaching the 
competitive extremes reached in some parts o"f the United States 
economy. 

It has been suggested that our stable society has only been 
possible because we have been living in accordance with habits 
of unselfishness based upon centuries of established routine, but 
that these habits have been undermined by a century of individualist 
philosophy and capitalist institutions just at the time when they 
are most needed for a successful change to a Socialist society. 

(ill) The Significance of Socialist Values 

It is important for Socialists, therefore, to have clear in their own 
minds, and to make clear to others, the values on which they are 
attempting to build the new society. If they do not, there is a 
serious danger of a conflict of values which is one of the main 
causes of social disintegration. The effects of the contrast between 
what is taught and what is practiced in our industrial society have 
been frequently noted by social workers as the cause of anti-social 
conduct. Mr. J. H. Bagot, the headmaster of a secondary school, 
recently told a conference of industrial training officers that many 
children, on leaving school, where their life was based on spiritual 
values, were profoundly shocked by the lower standards of value 
which they met at work. We have to be sure that the new social 
institutions which we are creating correspond to the values which, 
as Socialists, we proclaim, and that the means by which the Socialist 
society is to be achieved correspond to the ends we desire. If 
we do not, there will be intellectual and moral confusion. 

If the individual is to be helped to think and behave rationally 
he must also feel that there is a real relation between the rewards 
which society offers to those who accept its values and his own 
work. Gilbert Murray, writing of Greek religion, wrote that 
"... the best seed-ground for superstition is a society in which 
the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no relation to their 
merits and effort . A stable and well-governed society does tend, 
speaking roughly, to ensure that the virtuous and industrious 
apprentice shall succeed, while the wicked and idle apprentice fails. 
And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable 
and visible chains of causation." But in a society suffering from 


SOCTALTSM AND THE STUDY OF MAN 

every sort of unexplained disaster or governed by the whim of a 
despot"... the ordinary virtues o'f diligence, honesty, and kindliness 
seem to be of little avail. The only way to escaiJe destruction 
is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the 
strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate fate or fortune or 
angry God that is sending the earthquake or pestilence." 8 I invite 
you to translate that pregnant passage into modern terms. 

When there is a great contrast between ends and means, 
between values proclaimed and values practiced, between individual 
merit and reward in accordance with those values, frustration often 
turns into impotent resentment. This resentment may not, in the 
first place, show itself in revolt, but may lead to apathy and non-
participation in the social and political life of the community. When 
this occurs, democracy is already in danger. 

It is for these reasons that we must, as speedily as possible, 
get rid of the social and class distinctions that still remain a barrier 
to talent in our society. This means dealing not only with education, 
but also with the methods of selection and training for 
positions in every sort of organisation. We also need to consider 
carefully whether we are to encourage competition or co-operation . 
as the basic principle o'f industrial activity, and whether income 
is chiefly to be based on reward for value contributed or on need. 
It seems likely that the supposedly normal instincts of competition 
and desire for pecuniary reward as an incentive for effort are 
really in conflict with basic human needs, and that the attempt to 
act in accordance with values based on these assumptions causes 
considerable unhappiness to normal personalities. What human 
beings need most, from infancy onwards, is love and approbation. 
In adult life they need to feel that they are valued, that they are 
playing a recognised part in the life of the community, that their 
work has significance and provides status. It is this feeling of 
significance and status that modern technological advances in 
industry have destroyed by increasing the gap between the highly 
trained technical staff and the mass of productive workers, whose 
jobs can be learnt in a few hours. The old craft occupations-
carpenter, baker, blacksmith, and so on-had a real social significance 
which is completely lacking in the unnamed jobs performed 
in a mass-production factory, where every process has been 
splintered into its elements. I 'frankly do not know the answer to 
this problem, which cuts at the root of the insistence of democratic 
socialism on the value of individual personality. We can make 
a start by reconciling the emotional desire for significant status 
with the varying capacities of individuals, by providing equal opportunity, 
and taking care that everyone is doing work which is best 
suited to their abilities-including jobs requiring inteiiectual or 

administrative ability of a high order, as well as jobs for the 

5-10 per cent. whose inteiiigence is subnormal. 


20 AUTUMN LECTURES 1950 

These are the factors which underlie all our recent discussions 
on incentives in the planned society: a problem almost completely 
neglected in the past by Socialists, although some of us started to 
examine it, in a little paper called "Labour Discussion Notes," in 
1941. There have been signs in recent statements of Labour 
Party policy that we have run away from the problem and are 
seeking refuge in the assumptions of Utilitarian philosophy. Our 
re-discovery of the blessings of competition seems to me to be an 
example of this development. 

Meanwhile, there is a danger that propaganda and exhortation 
may be used to cover up the social disorganisation to which a system 
of conflicting values will give rise. I am not such a pessimist as 
Canon Demant, who foresees a decaying civilisation compensated 
for by external organisation and frantic appeals to " loyalty " to 
a pattern of life which no longer appeals by its intrinsic excellence. 
There is much in our present society which men and women value 
and will make sacrifices to maintain, but from Socialism they expect 
something else. What they expect and will respond to cannot be 
expressed in words alone : one of the signs of our advancingmaturity whioh Graham Wallas envisaged was that an increasing 
proportion of the population would, even if only half-consciously, 
" see through " the cruder forms of emotional appeal. That this 
is happening is the reason why the popular Press is not the menace 
that it at first sight appears to be and why speeoh-making is no 
longer the most important activity of a politician. The best propaganda 
is personal and public action in accordance with a set o'f 
values which have been constantly proclaimed and consistentlyapplied. It is this consistency in the behaviour of public authorities 
which people recognise as justice and whioh provides that inner, 
psychological security which enables people to exercise forethought 
and reason in their political decisions and which is as importantfor happiness as the new conditions of material security of which 
we are so proud. 

London, 20th October, 1950. 

REFERENCES 

1 CANON V. A. DE:MAN't. Relig~on aad tl1e Dccliue of Capitalism. "The 
Listener." 11th May, 195 et seq. 
'EL'tON MAYO. Tlte Social Proble1ns of an I11dttstriat Civilisation. Harvard 

University. Pp. 38-40. 
'MARCARET MEAD. Male and Fenw.lc. Gollancz. P. 23. 
'SARGANT FLORENCE. Patterns ia Recrmt Social Research. Brit. Journal 

of Sociology. September, 1950. 
'RoBERT K. MER'rON. Social Theory .a~td Social Structure. Columbia 

University. P. 328. 
']. B. S. HALDANE. Possible Worlds. 
' RoBERT K. MuroN. 0 p. cit pp. 79-80. 
'GtLBtllT MURRAY. F.ive Stages of Greek ReJigioa. Watts. P. 132. 


~~N-TZ~------


""'-------·---, __ .,._ -"""'··---_....,.,, ugo-tv ..--.a.&IOU;,UA. D\.I~ICI., VY,.L, 


AUSTEN ALBU, M.P., 

was for 15 years works manager at a Greenford factory. 
ln 1946-47 'he was responsible for co-ordinating political 
and administrative policy in Germany and the development 
of the new German constitution. He has been M.P. 
for Edmonton since 1948, and is a member of the Fabian 
Society Executive Committee. Author of Fabian pamphlet 
" Management in Transition." 


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