Word: fabianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...charm of it all for Shaw himself was that the English always survived his attacks and came back for more. They earned his lasting respect by paying him handsomely for it and then, by turning Fabian as he had urged, diddling him out of his savings and earnings at the rate of 19/6 in the ?, plus the Death Duties. In Ireland, he might have been reduced to the alcoholism which had frightened him as a child in the life of his father. And there was a second strain of Irish genius which can be developed to a higher pitch outside...
...profound shock to Shaw's comic genius and his optimism. Heartbreak House appeared to many as a confusion. The disillusion with the failures of the Labor government, in which the Webbs and many of his Fabian friends served, turned Shaw back to his own inherited responses. The old 18th Century taste for autocrats revived. So Mussolini was admired, Hitler was given a hand and Stalin was exalted. Their virtue was that they were practical. Shaw appeared to agree with the scientists that what succeeds is good and he had been careful, as a Marxist, to say that capitalism...
...revolutions of the last 30 years have been made by war, not by Shavian gradualism, even in England. But he was the indefatigable showman at the door for more than half a century who, until the wars came, stole the show. It was war which established the final Fabian victory...
...Light Matter. Rightly or wrongly, for 55 years the London School of Economics has had a reputation for just the opposite-a hotbed of socialism, Tories called it, a breeder of radicals. It began one day in 1894, when Fabian Socialist Sidney Webb received an unexpected legacy of ?10,000 from a fellow Fabian who had just blown his brains out. After mulling over the matter with his wife Beatrice, Sidney decided to start a new school where socialist theory would stand on an equal footing with more conventional viewpoints. "Above all," explained Beatrice Webb to her diary, "we want...
Before long, the world began to hear a good deal about L.S.E. Hundreds of students flocked to hear Philosopher Bertrand Russell, or Sidney Webb himself, lecturing on the Fabian way in his high nasal voice. In 1912 a young man named Clement Attlee joined the faculty to teach social science and administration. Former pupils remember him as a quiet, dry, sometimes boring lecturer, devoted to his subject, who inspired classes only by his meticulous sincerity. Later, other young reformers followed: Philip Noel-Baker, now Labor's Minister of Fuel and Power; onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton...