Description:
In GB, the period before the First World War has been called an era of Christian Socialist revival. Clerics and members of almost all denominations increasingly spoke out against mass poverty, slumdom and inhumane working conditions and began to campaign for social justice and the improvement of conditions for the working classes. This active involvement of clerics and believers in the fight for social reform - commonly referred to by contemporaries and historians under the heading of Christian Socialism - constituted in the eyes of historians a specific characteristic of British social history and it has been used to explain certain aspects of the particular cast of the British welfare state. The present study explores in some detail what (if any) particular contribution Anglican and non-Conformist theology made to the re-thinking of the social question in Great Britain between 1880 and 1914 and whether there was ever any such coherence of thought which the name Christian Socialism implies. The study looks at and compares the social and political thought, reform programmes and argumentative structures of seven thinkers of whom four were practicing Christians, two were non-Christian and one was expressly anti-Christian. The study shows that there was considerable overlap between the policy proposals, their ideas on the role of the state and on the ideal form of social organisation of Christian and non-Christian thinkers. These congruencies make it difficult to draw a clear line of distinction between allegedly Christian versus non-Christian socialism in these respects ...