ABSTRACT
In this slim volume Russell developed his specific political ideology more clearly than in any other book that he wrote during the Great War. Confronted after 1914 by what he saw as the excessive powers of the State, he formulated his own version of Guild Socialism as the best and perhaps the only way to restore and preserve democratic institutions and civil liberties. 'Cabinet Caes¬ arism', backed by industrial and financial capitalism and fuelled by xenophobic propaganda, had, he argued, subverted representative institutions, particularly the House of Commons. To restore liberty, Russell advocated an extension of self-government to all important groups on those issues that concerned them and that would not substantially affect the rest of the community. He sought to reconcile the legitimate claims of the worker and the consumer by organizing the workers or producers into democratic industrial guilds with relations among the various groups to be settled by a Guild Congress. Russell saw in such a system of 'federalism among trades' an analogue for 'federalism among nations'. Consumers would have their interests protected since there would still be some state control. Parliament would remain to oversee those issues that concerned the community as a whole. Moreover, where there were conflicts between the Guild Congress and Parliament, a joint committee, consisting of an equal number of representatives from each, would meet. Because it was still possible that members from the Guild Congress and Parliament might combine against the interests of the community, individual liberty would best be protected by citizens who had common interests organizing themselves into groups that were determined to resist infringements of their independence, even to the extent of opposing any state laws or guild regulations that infringed any particular group's rights. Such a system demanded 'a diffused
respect for liberty, and an absence of submissiveness to government'.
