History of Socialist Thought

G.D.H.Cole (1889-1959) was an outstanding political historian and theorist during the interwar and immediate postwar periods. He was a Labour Party intellectual who helped to shape the party's thinking, active in the peace movement during the First World War and in the Fabian Society in its early days. Cole was first influenced by the ideas of William Morris and Rousseau and his own socialist views were close to the early self-help and utopian thinkers - as he put it 'the reason - the only valid reason - for being a Socialist is the desire, the impassioned will, to seek the greatest happiness and well-being of the greatest number.' He was an indefatigable author, writing more than a hundred books, both on politics and on economics. This seven-volume collection is his comprehensive account of the development of socialist thinking from the early 'social' thinkers who favoured cooperative action, through to the development of ideas of social democracy and of achieving social justice through social and political revolution.