A HOUSE OF THEORY
31
fruitful, a source of inspiration and controversy, it needs to
be
presented as an autonomous moral conception, independent of, and
ultimately sovereign over, the mere notions of efficiency and rational
"tidying up" of capitalist society into which Socialism is in danger
of degenerating.
If
we seek here for inspiration in our own tr,adition we have
not far to look. The Guild Socialists dissented on precisely this
point from their less ambitious and more purely Benthamite col–
leagues, in that the latter were concerned with the damage done
to the consumer and the former with the damage done to the pro–
ducer. The Guild Socialists were deeply concerned with the destruc–
tion of community life, the degradation of work, the division of
man from man which the economic relationships of capitalism had
produced; and they looked to the factories themselves, for the
restoration of what was lost. Such ideas were and are easy targets
for mockery, and in the old Guild Socialist form were doubtless
quite impracticable; and they faded from the scene partly because
they were tied to inadequate techniques, and partly because the
conception of the Welfare State presented an easier and more
obviously urgent and attractive target. With its achievement it is ne–
cessary to renew our study of the more difficult and fundamental
problems of capitalism. We cannot live without the "experts." But
the true "open society" in the modem world is one in which expert–
ise
is not mysterious; and the only way to prevent it from becoming
mysterious is continually to subordinate its activities to a lively and
interested
public opinion; and
this
in tum will languish without
"theories." The Welfare State marks the successful end of the first
road which the Socialist movement in this country elected to travel.
It is time now to go back and explore the other road, to go back to
the point of divergence, the point not so very far back at which we
retained as a living morality ideas which were common to Marx and
to William Morris.
