ABSTRACT
British sociology has quickly gained a forgotten period of the years between the World War I and the late 50s and 60s when the expansion of university education and the formation of the British Sociological Association provided new impetus to discuss sociology's history. This chapter considers the work of a scholar active throughout this forgotten period: George Douglas Howard (G. D. H) Cole. Cole had a normative conception of sociological study as telling people how to be socially good'. Guild socialism, in Cole's hands, was based on the two critiques which, as noted above, emerged from his critical sociology. Firstly, capital not only exacerbated poverty but also reduced the individual autonomy and freedom found in work. The second critique concerns the nature of representative democracy, since assuming that one person can represent each individual in all their functional activity flagrantly violates the fundamental principles of democracy.
