Background

Sidney James Webb was born on July 13, 1859, in London, England, the United Kingdom, into a lower-middle-class shop-keeping family. His parents devoted their resources to educating Sidney as a means of upward mobility. His father held radical political views and was a strong supporter of John Stuart Mill in the 1865 General Election.

Education

Webb was educated in Switzerland, Germany, the Birkbeck Institute, the City of London College, and through his own intensive reading. In 1885, he was called to the bar and in the following year received his bachelor of laws degree from London University.

Career

Webb started his career as a clerk in a colonial broker’s office in London in 1975. He then also worked as a civil servant at War Office, and as a surveyor of Taxes Office and Colonial Office till 1891.

In 1885 Webb joined the Fabian Society and soon became a dominating influence on that organization. After he resigned from the civil service, he ran successfully for the London County Council. During most of the next 2 decades, he was chairman of the Technical Education Committee of the council and brought about a thoroughgoing reform and centralization of the educational system in London. In 1895, he became the founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he then taught political economy and public administration from 1912 to 1927. During that period of time, he also served as a lecturer on political economy at Working Men’s College.

In 1892 Webb married Beatrice Potter. From that time on, their work merged so thoroughly that it is impossible to distinguish their individual contributions. By 1910 the Webbs decided that the Fabian policy of working through the existing political parties without partisan involvement had outlived its usefulness, and the Fabian Society threw its weight behind the Labour party.

From 1915 to 1925 Sidney was a member of the party executive. In 1920 he was elected to Parliament, and in 1924 he was appointed the president of the Board of Trade. Although he retired from office in 1928, he was called out of retirement in 1929 to serve (as Baron Passfield) as secretary of state for the colonies, the position he held till the fall of the Labour government in August 1931.

Achievements

• Sidney Webb was one-half of one of the most remarkable collaborative pairs in English letters and social reform, the husband-and-wife team of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Together and separately, they were a formidable force for social change in the Britain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as writers, editors, and active political figures. Among the earliest and most notable of their works are The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). Later there were nine massive volumes of the history of English Local Government, the first of which appeared in 1906 and the last in 1929. The same year, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Passfield, of Passfield Corner in the County of Southampton.
  
  For the Fabian Society, Webb also wrote on poverty in London, the eight-hour day, land nationalisation the nature of socialism, education, eugenics and reform of the House of Lords. He also drafted Clause IV, which committed the Labour Party to public ownership of industry.
  
  After the fall of the Labour government in 1932, the Webbs toured the Soviet Union and extolled it in their Soviet Communism: A New Society? (1935).
  
  In 2006, the London School of Economics, alongside the Housing Association landlord Places for People, renamed their Great Dover Street student residence Sidney Webb House in his honour.

Works

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  • The History Of Trade Unionism 1919
  • Industrial Democracy 1897
  • The London programme 1891
  • The basis & policy of socialism 1889
  • Soviet Communism: a New Civilisation? 1935
  • Socialism in England 1890
  • English Local Government: The Story of the King's Highway 1929
  • A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain 1923
  • Problems of Modern Industry 1898

Politics

Though Webb was a member of the Labour Party, he was willing to work with any political party in order to obtain the policies he believed in.

In the later years, ignoring mounting evidence of the atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin, Webb was a supporter of the Soviet Union until his death.

Views

Quotations: "Just as every human being has an ancestry, unknown to him though it may be; so every idea, every incident, every movement has in the past its own long chain of causes, without which it could not have been. Formerly we were glad to let the dead bury their dead: nowadays we turn lovingly to the records, whether of persons or things; and we busy ourselves willingly among origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We are no longer proud of having ancestors, since every one has them; but we are more than ever interested in our ancestors, now that we find in them the fragments which compose our very selves."

"It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that a society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units—that it possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components. A perfect city became recognized as something more than any number of good citizens—something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other balances than the individual man. The community must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community: its life transcends that of any of its members; and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with those of the whole."

"The capitalist is very fond of declaring that labour is a commodity, and the wage contract a bargain of purchase and sale like any other. But he instinctively expects his wage-earners to render him, not only obedience, but also personal deference. If the wage contract is a bargain of purchase and sale like any other, why is the workman expected to toff his hat to his employer, and to say ‘sir’ to him without reciprocity?"

Membership

Webb was one of the organizers, with Beatrice Potter, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, and others, of the Fabian Society, formed in 1884 as an intellectual movement to conduct propaganda of an evolutionary Socialist character.

• 

  The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.

  Fabian Society , United Kingdom

  1884 - 1947

Personality

Sidney was an empiricist by temperament.

Connections

In 1892 Webb married Beatrice Potter. As a couple, the Webbs stood as an example of a marriage of equals in which commitment to a social and intellectual ideal was the ruling passion. He and his wife were also friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell. When Beatrice Webb died in 1943, the casket containing her ashes was buried in the garden of their house in Passfield Corner. The couple had no children.

Today, the Webbs' ashes are interred in the nave of Westminster Abbey, close to those of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin.

Wife:

Beatrice Webb

Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer.

Friend:

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic and political activist.

Friend:

George Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist.

References

• A Victorian courtship: The story of Beatrice Potter and Sidney Webb
  1979
• Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists
  1984
• Theories of the Labor Movement
  1987