saw the antidote to "hugeness" not in the self-governing workshop but in the much more nebulous notion of "community." Since he still accepted centralization as an unavoidable imperative of modern technology and politics, and since the Labour party had long since "abandoned the goal of workers' control," as Robert Dahl observed in 1947, he had to take refuge in the fragile hope that "small groups," if they could be given a "functional place in our society," would counter the "tendency towards bureaucratisation." "We must ... at once accept hugeness as the environment of the coming society, and find means of not being drowned in it."

In the forties and fifties, Cole criticized the Labour party for advocating a program of "further nationalisation" for which "nobody feels any enthusiasm." The party, he said, had fallen victim to the "tendency towards centralisation and authoritarian control, which it should have been its mission to fight." Yet he endorsed the expansion of the welfare state, even though it took over services formerly provided by families, mutualaid societies, and neighborhoods and thereby undermined the "small groups" he wanted to preserve.

Cole's rediscovery of "group life" coincided with another period of revulsion, on the British left, against the dominant socialist tradition. It was in the fifties that E. P. Thompson resurrected William Morris, while Raymond Williams found unsuspected insights in the conservative criticism of modern culture. Cole himself turned to historical studies at this time. His History of Socialist Thought singled out for special praise the very figures despised or dismissed both by Marxists and by Fabians: Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Ruskin, and Morris. Cole's work in the last phase of his career thus contributed to a vigorous new school of historical scholarship and more generally to the emergence of the new left, which would once again attempt to combine socialism with localism and "community"—with no more success, in the end, than the guild socialists had enjoyed in their own day. Repeated failures of this sort indicate that it is the basic premise of progressive thought—the assumption that economic abundance comes before everything else, which leads unavoidably to an acceptance of centralized production and administration as the only way to achieve it—that needs to be rejected. Until it is, "community" will remain an empty slogan.

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