Wikimedia
needs your help in its US$75,000 fund drive. See our fundraising page
for details.
We are over 80% there thanks to all those who have
donated so far! Day 8 report (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-February/002429.html)
and details

Fabian Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

(Redirected from Fabianism)

The Fabian Society is a British socialist
intellectual movement best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning
in the late 19th century and then up to
World War
I. Similar societies exist in Australia and New
Zealand. The Australian Fabian Society was established in 1947. Still
active, it is Australia's longest running political think tank.

Fabianism focused on the advancement of socialist ideas through gradual
influence and patiently insinuating socialist ideology into intellectual circles
and groups with power.

The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party in this
time-period and is still in existence today.

The society was founded on January 4, 1884 in London, UK as an offshoot of a society
founded in 1883
called The Fellowship of the New Life.

Fellowship members included poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, sexologist Havelock Ellis and future
Fabian secretary Edward Pease. They wanted
to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others
to follow. But when some members also wanted to become politically involved to
aid society's transformation, it was decided that a separate society, The Fabian
Society, also be set up. All members were free to attend both societies. The
Fellowship of the New Life disbanded sometime in the early 1890s but the Fabian Society grew
to become the pre-eminent intellectual society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian Era.

Immediately upon its inception it began attracting many intellectuals drawn
to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw,
H. G.
Wells, Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, Annie Besant, Graham
Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith
Nesbit, Sydney
Olivier and Emmeline Pankhurst.
Even Bertrand Russell later
became a member.

The group, which favoured gradual rather than revolutionary change, was
named in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus
Cunctator (nicknamed "the Delayer"), who advocated tactics involving
harassment and attrition rather than
head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the
renowned general Hannibal Barca.

Many Fabians participated in the formation of the Labour Party in 1900 and the group's constitution, written by
Shaw, was borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Labour Party. At
the Labour Party
Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and
sent one delegate.

In the period between the two World Wars, the "Second Generation"
Fabians—including the great writers R. H. Tawney, G. D. H.
Cole and Harold Laski—continued to
be a major influence on social-democratic
thought.

It was at this time that many of the future leaders of the Third World were
exposed to Fabian thought; most notably, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, who
subsequently framed economic policy for one-fifth of humanity on Fabian
social-democratic lines.

Through the course of the 20th century the group has
always been influential in Labour Party circles, with members including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn,
Harold Wilson and more
recently Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown. The Society is affiliated to the Party as a Socialist Society.

In recent years the Young Fabian group, founded in 1960, has become an important
networking and discussion organisation for younger (under-31) Labour Party
activists and played a role in the 1994 election of Tony Blair
as Labour Leader.

The society's 2004
annual report showed that there were 5,810 individual members (down 70 from the
previous year), of whom 1,010 were Young
Fabians, and 294 institutional subscribers, of which 31 were Constituency
Labour Parties, co-operative societies, or
trade
unions, 190 were libraries, 58 corporate, and 15
other—making 6,104 members in total. The society's net assets were £86,057, its
total income £486,456, and its total expenditure £475,425. There was an overall
surplus for the year of £1,031.

The latest edition of the Dictionary
of National Biography (a reference work listing details of famous or
significant Britons throughout history) includes 174 Fabians.

[edit]

Notable members of Australian Fabian Society

Gough Whitlam (Prime
Minister 1972–75)

Bob
Hawke (Prime Minister 1983–1991)

Paul Keating (Prime
Minister 1991–1996)

John
Cain (premier of Victoria)

Jim
Cairns (deputy prime minister)

Don
Dunstan (Premier of South Australia)

Neville Wran (Premier of
NSW 1976–86)

Frank Crean (deputy prime
minister)

Arthur Calwell

Henry
Hyde Champion (Journalist)

John
Percy Jones (Businessman)

Nettie Palmer (Writer)

Ernest
Besant-Scott (Historian)

Lucy
Morice (Feminist)

Charles
Strong (Clergyman)

William
Henry Archer (Statistician)

Edward
Shann (Economist)

Charles
Marson (Clergyman)

David
Charleston (Trade Unionist)

John
Howlett Ross (Teacher)

Bernard
O'Dowd (Writer)

[edit]

See also

Reformism

[edit]

External links

Official
website (http://www.fabian-society.org.uk/)

The History of the
Fabian Society (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/13715)
by Edward R. Pease, its
secretary for 25 years; from Project Gutenberg

Australian Fabian
Society (http://www.fabian.org.au/)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society"

Categories:
Political
and economic thinktanks | Political
and economic thinktanks of the United Kingdom | Social
Democracy | UK Labour
Party

Views

Article

Discussion

Edit
this page

History

Personal tools

Create
account / log in

Navigation

Main
Page

Community
portal

Current events

Recent changes

Random page

Help

Donations

Search

Toolbox

What
links here

Related
changes

Special pages

In other languages

中文

This page was last modified 21:19, 20 Feb 2005.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU
Free Documentation License (see Copyrights
for details).

About Wikipedia

Disclaimers