Penguin Books and political change

Britain's meritocratic moment, 1937–1988

Dean Blackburn

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526129291
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Founded in 1935 by a young publisher disillusioned with the class prejudices of the interwar publishing trade, Penguin Books set out to make good books available to all. The 'Penguin Specials', a series of current affairs books authored by leading intellectuals and politicians, embodied its democratising mission. Published over fifty years and often selling in vast quantities, these inexpensive paperbacks helped to shape popular ideas about subjects as varied as the welfare state, homelessness, social class and environmental decay. Using the 'Specials' as a lens through which to view Britain's changing political landscape, Dean Blackburn tells a story about the ideas that shaped post-war Britain. Between the late-1930s and the mid-1980s, Blackburn argues, Britain witnessed the emergence and eclipse of a 'meritocratic moment', at the core of which was the belief that a strong relationship between merit and reward would bring about social stability and economic efficiency. Equal opportunity and professional expertise, values embodied by the egalitarian aspirations of Penguin's publishing ethos, would be the drivers of social and economic progress. But as the social and economic crises of the 1970s took root, many contemporary thinkers and politicians cast doubt on the assumptions that informed meritocratic logic. Britain's meritocratic moment had passed.

1

WHY WAR?

When Penguin published the first Special, in November 1937, Britain was in the grip of two inter-related crises. The first was economic. Although some efforts had been made to resolve the economic downturn that had followed from the global financial crisis of 1929, over 10 per cent of the adult population remained unemployed, and primary poverty continued to blight large sections of the population.1 The second crisis was political. The Spanish Civil War had aroused considerable anxiety, and as they observed Hitler’s advance, many commentators and intellectuals had begun to argue that liberal democracy was under threat. This chapter views these crises through the lens of Penguin’s political texts. It begins by exploring the way in which these crises were described by Penguin’s authors before tracing the ideological change that took place in response to them. The late inter-war period was a moment of rupture that witnessed the birth of a new ideological settlement. Despite being fragile and fraught with tensions, this settlement nonetheless established some hegemonic principles and assumptions that were accommodated by a wide range of policy-makers and intellectuals.

The argument that the late 1930s witnessed the emergence of a new intellectual settlement with enduring consequences is not entirely new. As early as 1964, Arthur Marwick suggested that in their attempts to resolve the economic turbulence of the period, progressive politicians and intellectuals established a policy agenda sponsored by agencies of ‘middle opinion’ and which laid the groundwork for the creation of the post-war welfare state.2 But while Marwick and others were preoccupied with ideas about planning that formed the basis for political agreement, this chapter is concerned primarily with the way in which certain assumptions about reason and knowledge brought together intellectuals and policy-makers from different ideological traditions. Its central claim is that by the time war was declared, a set of ideas about rationality and the appropriate function of expertise had obtained a hegemonic status. These ideas had significant implications for the way in which many actors understood the social order and the nature of political conflict, and they provided a foundation for more substantive debates about the state and the kinds of policies that could resolve the perceived social conflict of the inter-war period.

When they constructed the intellectual basis for new kinds of political co-operation, political elites were not operating in a social vacuum. Their thinking was informed by broader social and cultural changes that disturbed older assumptions and generated new demands and aspirations. Penguin certainly played its part in these changes. Its commercial success followed, in part, from the emergence of new social groups that challenged prevailing cultural hierarchies, and many of Penguin’s books popularised a nascent sociology of ‘everyday life’ that allowed new descriptions of Britain’s social order to gain currency. One of the objectives of this chapter is to explore the implications of this regime of knowledge.

Penguin Books, which played an important role in disseminating new ideas, was both architect and symptom of the pre-war political settlement. In many respects, its social democratic vision of cultural democracy chimed with its legitimising ideology. As well as popularising the ideas of those progressive writers who were attempting to forge an alliance between anti-fascist forces, Penguin also supplied books to an emergent social scientific community that was forging a link between science and democracy.3 And its own attempt to reconcile its commercial interests and cultural ideals can be mapped on to a broader agenda of reform that sought to incorporate broadly egalitarian conceptions of social citizenship within an economic system that enshrined private property relations.

Because it was comprised of assumptions and beliefs that were the lowest common denominators of different ideological formations, the emergent intellectual settlement that Penguin helped to shape was fragile and incoherent. Yet it nonetheless established a set of parameters that framed wartime discussions about post-war reconstruction. It was, in part at least, the product of shared uncertainty. In response to the crises they observed, intellectuals and policy-makers from across the political spectrum cast around for new ideas that that could provide them with an understanding of their social environment and a vision of the future. In the ensuing battle for ideas, a new regime of knowledge was established, and although this did not inhibit all forms of political disagreement, it did install some hegemonic ideas that orientated political thinking towards particular problems. Many of these problems followed from new understandings of both the social order and the nature and potential of the modern state.

This chapter traces two ideological shifts that took place in the late inter-war period. First, it explores how the crises of the period changed the way in which intellectuals and policy-makers thought about knowledge. In attempting to understand and resolve the crises that they observed, these actors were compelled to consider the capacity of reason to comprehend the world, and although not everyone arrived at the same conclusions, many began to frame political problems in relation to a particular set of assumptions. Penguin Books facilitated this shift in a number of ways. Many of its authors advocated the conscious organisation of society in accordance with rationalist principles; it contributed to the establishment of new social identities that gave legitimacy to professional expertise; and it significantly increased the availability of social scientific knowledge.

Second, the chapter explores the way in which key political concepts acquired new hegemonic meanings. As Julia Stapleton has noted, the ideological landscape of the 1930s was complex.4 But it is possible to identify some ways in which the intellectual flux of the period allowed new meanings to be attached to some key concepts. These changes can be partly attributed to the way in which ideas about the appropriate relationship between merit and reward were accommodated by Britain’s major ideological traditions.

Making democracy social: Penguin Books and cultural democracy in inter-war Britain

We can begin by discussing the wider significance of the publishing enterprise that Allen Lane established. Doing so can not only reveal some of the social and cultural changes that informed the intellectual politics of the late inter-war period; it can also help us to understand why Penguin played such an important role in disseminating new ideas. When contemporaries cast their gaze upon Allen Lane’s ambitious project, they often drew attention to its egalitarian qualities. Margaret Cole’s assessment was characteristic. Writing in the Listener, Cole noted that Lane had helped to accelerate the ‘democratisation of books’.5 Until the Edwardian period, it had been common for publishers to assume that working-class readers lacked an appetite for quality literature. But the expansion of lending libraries and the popularity of cheap reprints had led to a slow shift in attitudes. Lane’s achievement was to demonstrate that there was a sizable market of readers who were willing to buy, as well as read, serious books.6 Similar observations were made by the authors of one of Penguin’s early Specials. Charles Madge and Tom Harrison had established Mass-Observation, a social research organisation, in 1937. When invited to publish a paperback outlining its activities in 1939, they identified Penguin Books as one of the institutions that had demonstrated that ‘a growing number of people want less stories and more facts’.7 After arguing that the function of democracy required a bridging of the gap between the ‘intellectual leader and the ordinary man’, they invited readers of the book to actively participate in their initiative.8

Implicit in Madge and Harrison’s commentary was an argument about the classless nature of the Penguin book. The Penguin book, it seemed, was an object that could move between the cultural boundaries that separated different social groups. Other left-leaning commentators were also sympathetic to this notion, and, in turn, they often regarded the Penguin book as a both an agent and symptom of social progress. George Orwell, for instance, drew attention to the way in which the paperback book was facilitating the emergence of a common intellectual culture. Whereas their hardback companions tended to be retained within the private home, paperbacks, he noted, might ‘pass through hundreds of hands before [they go] back to the pulping mill’. And because Penguin had popularised books that would have been considered ‘impossibly highbrow’ only a few years prior, it had expanded the market for quality literature.9 Evident in Orwell’s statements about Penguin is an acknowledgement of the distinctive social function of the paperback book. Penguin’s inexpensive books were the vanguards of a new social movement that was disturbing cultural hierarchies by removing the barriers to ‘higher’ forms of knowledge.

When writers identified Penguin as an agent of democratic advance, they often awarded the concept of democracy a distinctly social meaning. They not only employed this term to denote the notion that all citizens should have an equal opportunity to exercise their democratic will; they also used it to describe the equal status that citizens should enjoy within the social order. By increasing the availability of knowledge, Penguin, it seemed, was making democracy social. There were some tensions in Penguin’s vision of cultural democracy. Because Allen Lane and his editors invited their readers to ‘reach upwards’ in their pursuit of good literature, they necessarily privileged some readers over others. But these tensions should not obscure the way in which Lane’s ‘paperback revolution’ contributed to the cultural democratisation that took place in the inter-war period. According to most commentators, the Penguin book was a symbol of democratic citizenship, one which had demonstrated the redundancy of the aristocratic notion that virtuous skills and talents could only be nurtured by a hereditary elite.10

When describing Lane’s enterprise as a democratic achievement, writers drew upon broader ideas about social citizenship that had been in circulation since at least the beginning of the decade. As Pat Thane and others have noted, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of more expa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why war?
• 2 Where do we go from here?
• 3 The rise of the meritocracy
• 4 The stagnant society
• 5 Matters of principle
• 6 Free to choose
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index