Edwardian Intellectuals and Political Religions: A Survey

Historians of fascism trace elements of its ‘sacralised politics’ to left‐wing religiosity at the turn of the century. Emilio Gentile has provided detailed criteria to distinguish ‘political religion’ from ‘civil religion’ and ‘politicised religion’ from ‘religion as politics’. This paper tries to apply this taxonomy to late Victorian and Edwardian socialism in Britain. Intellectual arguments for a ‘religion of socialism’– as well as less‐theorised religious behaviour – are evident within three groupings that shaped the British socialist revival: the Social Democratic Federation, The Fabian Society, and the Independent Labour Party. Surveying members of each, including Ernest Belfort Bax, the Webbs, Shaw, Wells; John Trevor, and Keir Hardie, the paper lastly turns to Edward Carpenter, who moved between the aforementioned groups during his career, and whose popular and influential writings vividly capture socialism’s spiritual character. His case also illustrates the major obstacle in applying Gentile’s taxonomy to this period, namely the pervasive monism of the age, which blurs concepts of the temporal and divine. In conclusion, we can see that Edwardian socialism provided good conditions for the emergence of political religion but also for the civil religion of today’s centre left. A much more detailed discussion, beyond our scope here, might consider Gentile’s distinctions between functionalist, manipulative, noumenal forms of religiosity; distinctions brought home to Edwardian intellectuals through new theories of charisma and crowd psychology. Their knowledge, and application, of these ideas more clearly anticipates the rise of fascism; although, in the same generation, we should note a return to dualism as a defence against totalitarian political religion.