From Serfdom to Socialism
Written by Keir Hardie, and introduced and edited by John Callow.
A key text for the first generation of Labour Party activists, From Serfdom to Socialism stands both as a founding document of the Labour Party and as the fullest exposition of Hardie’s political thought.
Keir Hardie was the founder of the Labour Party, a pioneer trade unionist, a tireless campaigner for women’s rights, and the first working man ever to be elected to Parliament. As a key text for the first generation of Labour Party activists, From Serfdom to Socialism stands both as a founding document of the Labour Party and as the fullest exposition of Hardie’s political thought. It draws together into a coherent and explicitly socialist whole Hardie’s – often disparate – ideas on history, religion, women’s rights, and local and national government. In signalling the arrival of the Labour Party on the national stage, and defining all that it stood for, this book was to change the political landscape of Britain forever.
John Callow’s splendid new edition of James Keir Hardie’s great work From Serfdom to Socialism – the first new edition since 1974 – not only commemorates the centenary of Hardie’s death but also arrives at an important time in the Labour Party’s history.’ ‘John Callow’s edition of Hardie’s treatise speaks as urgently to the early twenty-first-century reader as it did to its readers more than a hundred years ago.’ Deborah Mutch, Cercles
