REDISCOVERING THE GUILD SYSTEM : THE NEW AGE CIRCLE AS A BRITISH LABORATORY OF CORPORATIST IDEAS ( 1906-1916 )

This article analyzes the role of the New Age circle as a laboratory of corporatist ideas in preWorld War One Britain. The New Age circle was an intellectual informal network composed by radical, antiliberal individuals coming from the entire political spectrum. Arguing that Corporatism was not just a socioeconomic product of fascist, authoritarian and nationalist ideologies, the essay highlights the corporatist tendencies existed within the network in exam between 1907 and 1916. In so doing, we try to show how the United Kingdom participated to a global corporatist reflection started before the advent of Fascism also by nonfascist groups. Therefore the paper firstly presents an overview of the most important intellectual landmarks of the New Age circle, such as William Morris and John Ruskin’s political and economic thought, Cardinal Manning’s social ideas and the concept of group juridical personality of Frederic W. Maitland and John N. Figgis. Secondly, the several and different forms of corporatist thought were presented, such as Penty’s medievalism, G.D.H. Cole’s Guild Socialism, De Maeztu’s right-wing, monarchic organicism and Belloc’s social Catholicism.

Conventionally, the emergence, growth, and development of corporatist ideas have been seen as one of the major issues of the socio-economic and political approach of fascist, nationalist, and authoritarian parties and movements. This historiographical point of view clearly implies an unfortunate omission, since it excludes the possibility of connections and transfers between the corporatist thought and non-fascist groups. Assuming a rigid equivalence between Fascism and Corporatism fails to take account of several projects for the reorganisation of society along corporatist lines promoted by non-fascist political subjects beforeand afterthe rise of Fascism. This paper tries to provide a new perspective on the problem, focusing on the pre-war British case. Since corporatist ideas were seen as the product of a reaction against liberal parliamentary policies, occurred throughout Europe between the 19 th and 20 th Centuries, the United Kingdom has seen largely immune to the anti-liberal corporatist theoretical elaboration. This essay challenges this historiographical interpretation by focusing on the New Age Circle, a group of writers, thinkers and intellectuals associated with «The New Age», a magazine about politics, literature and art edited from 1907 by Alfred R. Orage.
Although their thinking was neither monolithic nor coherent, the aim of this paper is to produce some insights into the general corporatist views that underpinned the New Age Circle's inner debates. In order to achieve this objective, the essay is organised into two main parts. In fact, although the official story of the New Age Circle begun, as mentioned before, in 1907, to start in that year would mean to miss too much. Therefore, the first section addresses the most important origins and intellectual landmarks that influenced the thinking of the New Age Circle's writers, while the second part focuses on the New Age Circle in the period between 1907 and 1916, underlining its features, characteristics and nuances.

ORIGINS AND INTELLECTUAL LANDMARKS
In order to explore what were the most important historical and intellectual landmarks for the New Age Circle's intellectuals, we have to refer to three strands of sources. Although acting with various and different intensity, all of the following cultural currents showed a massive impact on the thought of the intellectual circle in the decade before the First World War.
The first school of thought that has to be taken into consideration is represented by a long-lived cultural tradition that can be traced back to the thinking of English utopian social writers such as William Morris and John Ruskin. During the second half of the 19 th Century, both of them developed a particular kind of Socialism based upon an organic and prerevolutionary conception of social inter-relationships. Firmly opposed both to Liberalism and Capitalism, their anti-individualist fascination for a return to an idealised medieval rural England, marked the beginning of an intellectual tendency to refuse the industrial modernity in favour of a quieter, more harmonious and peaceful ancient society (THOMPSON, 1977).
Morris and Ruskin's echoes can be found in the work of one of the most influential friend and mentor of Alfred R. Orage, namely Arthur J. Penty. Born in York in 1875, he was an Architect and social thinker, close to Guild Socialism and Catholic Distributism during the 1910s and the 1920s. In 1906, Penty published an important volume entitled The Restoration of the Gild System, which served as a major source for all the New Age Circle's writers. Indeed Penty's work can be seen as one of the first efforts to re-evaluate and re-apply the concept of medieval guild to a modern, industrial environment (TAYLOR, 2004;MARTIN, 1967

Between Medievalism and Socialism
As previously mentioned, Penty's volume The Restoration of the Gild System represented one of the main sources of the New Age Circle and of Alfred R. Orage himself.
In fact, in the decade following its publication, several authors made explicit and implicit reference to his concept of restoring a guild system within the industrial society. For these reasons, Penty's work deserves here a careful analysis. More than the constructive side of his theory, which is actually poorly developed, Penty's criticisms both to Socialist Collectivism and Liberalism are worth particular consideration. Furthermore, the volume represented a landmark that helps us to better understand what ideas, cultures and authors had a major impact on Orage's intellectual network. Penty clearly outlined those influences since the preface of his book: Readers of the following pages will probably be aware that the idea of restoring the Gild system as a solution of the problems presented by modern industrialism is to be found in the writings of John Ruskin, who put forward the proposition many years ago (PENTY, 1906, p. VII).
As Ruskin and Morris before him, Penty, although considered himself a Socialist, strongly attacked Collectivism, judging it an impure and misleading version of social thinking: «may I be allowedhe affirmed in December 1907to explain that the criticism contained therein was not directed against the aims of Socialism, but against the particular scheme of bringing such ideals about as embodied in Collectivism» (PENTY, 1907, p. 127).
While rejecting the label of anti-socialism, -«at any ratehe affirmed -I am accustomed to call myself a Socialist, and shall continue to do so» (PENTY, 1907, p. 127) -Penty criticised Collectivism in order to find another way to accomplish socialist goals. In his opinion, the fundamental mistake of all collectivist theorists was to identify the hidden cause of societal collapse in the capitalist economic competition, which, in Penty's mind, was not bad in itself but only in the socially disintegrating version of Capitalism. In fact, a properly regulated competitive economic system, such as, for instance, the medieval one, could be a positive instrument of socio-economic, cultural and spiritual growth.
It is true that competition, as it manifests itself in modern society, is a force of disintegration. But this is not because it is necessarily an evil thing; but because the conditions under which it is to-day pursued are intrinsically bad.
[…] Competition as it existed under the Gild System, when hours and conditions of labour, prices, etc., were fixed, was necessarily a matter of quality; for when no producer was allowed to compete on the lower plane of cheapness, competition took the form of a rivalry in respect to the greater usefulness or beauty of the thing produced (PENTY, 1906, p. 2-3).
Saving economic competition and thus private property, Penty started to formulate an idea of Socialism as a form of social machinery, a way to better organise the industrial forces of the nation.
However, it has to be underlined that his actual reform proposal was all but precisely developed. In fact, Penty only produced some vague insights, mainly envisaging an utopian happy society formed by rural owners and local closed markets, managed by sector-based industrial guilds that «being social, religious, and political as well as industrial institutions, […] postulated in their organization the essential unity of life» (PENTY, 1906, p. 3).
Nevertheless, two aspects stand out for their importance. Firstly, Penty's thinking was clearly based upon the figure of the producers, which were all the individuals involved in the production process. In this way, he started to replace the working class as a key concept for the social revolution, substituting it with the concept of organic nation, taken from Ruskin's ideas.
Secondly, Penty accused the idea of mechanical and scientific-based progresstypical of Capitalismto be the main cause of the decline of society: It may be said that the solution of our problems is to be found in a further development towards mechanical perfection, and this contention would be perfectly reasonable if the object of man's existence were to make cotton and buttons as cheaply as possible; but considering that man has a soul which craves some satisfaction, and that the progress of mechanical invention degrades and stultifies it by making man more and more the salve of the machine, we fell justified in asserting that real progress lies along other lines (PENTY, 1906, p. 18).
In Penty's mind, a true and profound human renewal lied in a moral and spiritual progress to which the mechanical improvement had to be subdued.
Machinery being a means to an end, we may test its social utility by considering its desirability or otherwise of the ends it is to serve (PENTY, 1906, p. 19).
Overall, Penty's book represents the first attempt to re-evaluate the medieval guild system, updated to the modern economy of the industrial society. It was, as we affirmed, a vague and scarcely precise effort; nevertheless The Restoration of the Gild system represented a major source of influence for several thinkers of the New Age Circle.

Group Juridical Personality and Corporate Bodies
Almost in the same years, a different theorisation of the concept of juridical personality, opposed to the Liberal doctrine, was spreading throughout Europe. The two most influent intellectuals that contributed to diffuse the concept of group personality in Britain, and the attached idea of a different kind of sovereignty and socio-economic and political organisation, were the jurist and historian Frederic W. Maitland and the catholic thinker John N. Figgis (NICHOLLS, 1994).
As already mentioned, both of them largely derived their ideas from the thought of the that started, at the end of 19 th century, to discredit individualism as a leading socio-economic and political theory (DEN OTTER, 1996;NICHOLSON, 1990). In the same vein, both Maitland and Figgis argued that the single individual was not the real fact of the society. In their opinion, the real juridical person upon which a community was built were the groups. In fact, as they often affirmed, we do not live as isolated individuals, but we find our fullest development in a vast number of associations and groups. Significantly, in 1913, Figgis affirmed: The notion of isolated individuality is the shadow of a dream. […] In the real world, the isolated individual does not exist; he begins always as a member of something, and, as I said earlier, his personality can develop only in society (FIGGIS, 1913, p. 55).
Before him, in a conference held in 1903 at the Newham College of Cambridge, Maitland stated that legal theory had to recognise the existence of another kind of juridical person other than the individual: Besides men or 'natural persons', law knows persons of another kind. In particular it knows the corporation, and for a multitude of purposes it treats the corporation very much it treats the man. Like the man, the corporation is […] a right-and-duty-bearing unit (MAITLAND, 1911, p. 306-307).
In order to strengthen this idea, in the introduction to the Gierke's translation, Maitland wrote that «a corporation […] is a real thoroughly person with a real will» (MAITLAND, 1900, p. XL), entailing that a group or an association naturally acquires its rights and duties without any government intermediations or legal justification.
Reshaping the very source of the sovereigntywhich had to be the group, and not the individualallowed those thinkers to establish the theoretical foundations for the genesis of a new kind of society. Within this new order, groups, associations and corporations would have played an essential role in the political, social and economic life of the nation. In fact, in Maitland and Figgis' thinking the group would have been more suitable to understand and manage the community, eventually replacing the central State in the role of government.

Social Catholicism in Britain
The final fundamental intellectual landmark was the Catholic social thinking arisen in This rapid overview of the cultural sources of the New Age Circle highlighted the great variety of influences and landmarks. Those influences, as we will see in the next pages, were mirrored in the great multiplicity of theoretical outcomes in the years between 1907 and the Great War.

THE NEW AGE CIRCLE: THE IRRESISTIBLE CHARM OF THE GUILDS
The leading figure of the New Age Circle was certainly the editor Alfred R. Orage. He was born in Yorkshire in 1873 and in 1894 he became a schoolteacher in an elementary school in Leeds, where he attended a study group on Plato (MAIRET, 1936;MARTIN, 1967;TAYLOR, 2004). The year 1900 marked the beginning of his association with the journalist and writer Holbrook Jackson, and especially with the architect and later social theorist Arthur

J. Penty. Interested in the study of English social thinkers, such as John Ruskin and William
Morris, as well as in the continental philosophy of Nietzsche, they founded the Leeds Art Club, one of the most advanced centres for modernist thinking in the pre-war Britain (MATTHEWS, 1979: 147-166). Their interests encompassed themes such as socialist and anarchist policies, Nietzsche's philosophy, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, modernist poetry and abstract expressionist art (Steele, 1990). all shared an anti-positivist, anti-liberal and anti-parliamentary tendency, absorbing and reflecting a way of thinking elaborated elsewhere in Europe. This new cultural, political and socio-economic tendency was mirrored by a growing interest for the pre-revolutionary world: the society of ancient regime was seen as a harmonious community, where every social group had precise rights and duties. Therefore, the medieval and modern era economic organisation system was positively evaluated, leading to a rediscovery of the guild system as the most efficient and equal form of industrial organisation.

Reforming Socialism: a Nationalist Framework for a Moral Renewal
As well as in other European countries, during the pre-war period the New Age Circle Socialism was drifting away from its positivist roots, falling into an ambiguous cultural dimension, which could rest in several different political movements.
But what was the core of this new socialism? As shown by the British historian Tom Villis, Orage's socialist tendency was part of a common European attempt to dissociate Socialism from its democratic and parliamentary overtones, freeing it from materialist and collectivist bias (VILLIS, 2006). The father of the anti-materialist European socialism was with no doubt the French philosopher Georges Sorel, but it had a large diffusion throughout Europe, especially in Italy, where it influenced also Fascist corporatist ideology. The moral issue within the so-called social question represented the main interest within the new social attitude of several European intellectual not convinced by the collectivist formula. As stated before, the New Age Circle represented the British part of this European reaction against materialism and classic Marxist socialism, refusing its scientific background and substituting it with a strong ethical, non-classist and organicist attitude. Significantly, in 1910, Orage affirmed that «we are in for a revolution, political, economic, and, we would add, moral» (ORAGE, 1907, p. 41), where the third term clearly stands out for its importance and originality.
Therefore, Orage's main goal, as he put in 1912, was «reconstructing both the theory and practice of Socialism» (ORAGE, 1912, p. 27). Focusing firstly on the moral question, Orage started to replace the original Marxist analysis of the society, based on class relations and social conflict, with a strong nationalist framework. Since the renewal had to be principally moral, and solely as a consequence social and economic, the classic revolutionary subject, namely the working class, lost its centrality. Therefore, while rejecting the idea of class struggle, Orage started to look at the idea of nation, rather then the class, as the new benchmark for his new theory of Socialism. One of his articles of September 1909 clearly revealed this new attitude: No class has been able by itself either to achieve power or to maintain power; and if King, Barons and the Middle Classes have successively failed in this, we cannot see that the working classes can hope to succeed.
[…] Now, Socialism knows no such distinction. A Socialist Party is not the party of a class but of the nation; and exactly as the Labour Party finds itself committed to the policy of exclusion will it find itself opposed to Socialism, and therefore to its own interests (ORAGE, 1909, p. 373-374). Therefore, in Orage's mind, a true socialist party should have been the party «of the whole community, representative of all the national interests, without distinction of class, sect, sex, or creed» (ORAGE, 1907, p. 141). In the same vein, a true democratic and popular government should have been the result of the pacific cooperation between all the classes, which means all the economic and social interests that composed a national community. It is interesting to notice that Orage labelled as oligarchy any political system where the power is monopolised by a single social class, which more and more became a synonym of economic interest group: We intend to convey by the word Oligarchy a system of government in which power is confined practically to a single class. That class may be the class of the nobility, as it was yesterday, or it may be the class of the wealthy, as it is today; or, again, it may be the class of the hand labouring proletariat, as Mr. Keir Hardie, for example, says it will be to-morrow. But whatever class it is, If power belongs exclusively to it, the resulting form of government is an Oligarchy, that is, government by class (ORAGE, 1907, p. 141).
For Orage, a true socialist, democratic and equal government should have emerged from the harmonic cooperation of all the social classes, each one according to its capabilities and competences: Such a government only deserves to be called a popular government and a democratic government in the true sense of the word, since It represents not, as of old, merely the noble class, nor, as now, merely the wealthy class, nor, again, as may be in the future, the class of the day-labourer, but all classes, each according to its political capacity and merits (ORAGE, 1910, p. 50).

Towards a Functional Society
During the 1910s, an organicist conception of the society underpinned Orage's thinking as well as the ideas of his growing intellectual network. According to the organicist doctrine, the nation was a metaphysical entity, superior to the individuals that formed it. Therefore, the economic and social divergences existing within the society should have been Rights only arise when man enters into relation with the good, either to preserve the existing goods or to create new ones. In function of the goods, in the relation between men and goods, rights arise. Every right is functional (DE MAEZTU, 1916, p. 253). Therefore, the individual acquired his rights, even the right of freedom, only if he entered in association with other men in order to achieve a superior communal objective: «menwrote De Maeztu in 1915 on «The New Age»are associated for a common object and that the fulfilment of this common object is considered superior to the individual aims of its members» (DE MAEZTU, 1915, p. 424). Without this functional prerequisite, freedom was basically a detrimental principle, because every man would have used it in order to reach his egotistic ends with no concern for common good. Significantly, in 1918 Maurice B.
Reckitta catholic member of the New Age Circlestated that «the principle of individual liberty […] is radically and irremediably opposed to all organisations» (DE MAEZTU, 1915, p. 424).
Although variously developed, all the writers of the New Age Circle shared a same interest for a decentralised system where a significant amount of political and economic power was demanded to sectorial industrial organisms, since sovereignty only arises from groups that fulfilled a precise function within the national community. In order to overcome both the liberal parliamentary democracy and the social collectivist State theory, the New Age Circle's intellectuals developed an idea of socio-economic and political machinery shaped on the example of the medieval guild system, based on a range of coordinated, functional, industrial organisms.
Since sovereignty did lie neither in the central State nor in the individuals, but rather it emerged from groups, also the representation system had to be based on associations that fulfilled a precise role in the community and represented precise socio-economic interests. Therefore, as stated by Samuel G. Hobsonwho first coined the term Guild Socialism on «The New Age» in 1912industrial guilds would have really unified the nation through «the regimentation into a single fellowship of all those who are employed in any given industry» (HOBSON, 1914, p. 132). He continued stating that «every type and grade of worker, mental or manual, must be a member of the Guild» (HOBSON, 1914, p. 136 (COLE, 1913, p. 364). In its extreme theorisation, the geographically elected central government totally disappeared, becoming a simple association itself with the aim to perform the function to represent the consumer perspective.
Therefore, a functional, group-based representation had to replace a geographical, atomistic one, because recognising the existence of contrasting socio-economic interests was the only way to form a real government capable of harmonising them in order to reach a superior, national welfare. The national community had to be transformed, in 1913 Figgis' words, in «a society of societies» (FIGGIS, 1913, p. 49). Overall, the analysis of this British anti-liberal community allows us to grasp some general conclusions. First of all, focusing on the British case helps us to discover some historiographical distortions. In fact, in the United Kingdom fascist parties as well as declared corporatist proposals never achieved a great amount of public support. Nevertheless, the absence of a strong framing tool as the concept of Fascism, has led to an underestimation of the similarities that a part of the British thought had with the European cultural rebellion against Liberalism and parliamentary democracy. This rebellion did not lead necessarily to Fascism, and the United Kingdom represents an exemplary case that shows the various and different declinations taken within a similar cultural milieu.

CONCLUSIONS
Focusing exclusively on the New Age Circle, it has to be stated that it is almost impossible to provide a single, satisfying definition for the cultural and political space produced by the intellectuals studied. The terms socialism, nationalism or radical right are all equally distorting as they fail to take account of complicated, and often contradictory, attitudes towards themes such as revolution, labour, capital and nation. The least that can be said is that the New Age Circle's writers produced ideas and theories that contained several themes which have been seen as the distinctive characteristics of the pan-European revolt against positivism, parliamentary democracy and liberalism: a profound sense of cultural dislocation; a revolt against materialism and rationalism; a call for a new elite and for a moral renewal of the society; a strong anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal and anti-individualist feeling; and finally, the elaboration of proposals for a re-organisation of the society, deeply permeated by a corporatist atmosphere.