stances," socialism needed "sober prose writers" more than it needed "poets." In the same year, he published The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy, a flat-out defense of social democracy. He now argued, just as the Fabians always had, that industrial labor contained an irreducible element of drudgery and that workers would have to find self-expression largely in leisure and consumption. He dismissed the guild socialists' hope of reviving the joy of craftsmanship as "our particular form of cant." He repudiated the "idea of government as a moral discipline." Guild Socialism Restated, with its elaborate description of a new form of social organization, now struck him as a "politically minded person's utopia." He decided that there was a "great deal to be said," after all, "for 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' as the supreme maxim for political conduct." The guild socialists, he said, had exaggerated the average man's capacity for citizenship. They had failed to reckon with the "great strength of conservatism"—its refusal to make the "mistake of supposing man to be continuously an active political animal."

Like many other liberals and social democrats, Cole found himself increasingly attracted to social psychology in the twenties and thirties. He was impressed by psychological evidence that seemed to back up his suspicion that guild socialists had taken too generous a view of human nature. People wanted leisure and security, not the arduous pleasure of doing things for themselves. Irrational fears and anxieties played a larger part in human conduct than he and his friends had imagined. In the thirties, Cole came to see fascism as the clearest evidence of "deep irrationalities in the human mind," which would be exploited by the right if the left could not satisfy the need for security. Without security, man would be "flung back merely on his unreasoning and amoral under-self, which is ruled by appetite and is capable of believing anything that will serve its appetitive ends."

Eventually Cole's preoccupation with "mass society" drove him back to a position vaguely reminiscent of guild socialism, except that he now

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tion: "When we have got our schemes of socialization into working order, we can begin rapidly to devolve responsibility within them; but we cannot afford to risk failure and confusion by trying to be too 'democratic' at the very start."

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