ABSTRACT
Although the origins of guild socialism are often traced to the publication of a series of articles by S. G. Hobson in A. R. Orage’s paper The New Age, in 1912, A. J. Penty’s Restoration of the gild system in 1906 must be seen as the seminal work. The book was a fundamental attack upon the equation of socialism with the extension of state ownership or what he termed ‘collectivism’. As Penty saw it, the primary objective of ‘collectivism’ was to eliminate competition but it was the destruction of commercialism that was the fundamental prerequisite for the building of socialism. This was so because it was adherence to the principles of commercialism that had corrupted contemporary capitalist society through their impact on the nature and purpose of labour; such adherence ensured that the exigencies of the balance sheet triumphed over considerations of creativity, beauty and social utility.
