The focus of the present chapter is the progressive milieu of the 1890s. Its purpose is twofold: first, it aims to show how the lack of sharp theoretical dividing lines within progressive thought was reflected in a lack of sharp dividing lines between the ‘ideologies’, or even the membership, of progressive institutions; secondly, it considers the major crisis within progressivism precipitated by the Boer War. More broadly, it aims to show on the one hand how co-operation across lines of party and ‘ideology’ was an established progressive habit, and on the other how war, above all things, was capable of changing such organisational boundaries as did exist, and even of forcing a redefinition of progressive ideas.

The history of progressivism in the 1890s is to a large extent the history of the Fabian Society. This is not to say, however, that it must be the history of ‘Fabianism’, if by that term we understand the propagation of mechanical schemes to extend state intervention. ‘Fabianism’ was the doctrine and practice of Shaw and the Webbs, and, influential as it was, it did not represent the sum total of opinion within the Fabian Society, nor even among the original Fabian essayists. ‘Fabianism’ and the Fabian Society were not, before 1900 at least, coextensive terms.

The argument of the previous chapter should make it unnecessary to say that the significance of the Fabian Society does not lie, as is often supposed, in its introduction of collectivism to unsuspecting Liberals.