Love and Friendship: Ethical Socialism in Britain and Australia

The restoration of a British context to Australian historical writing has been a significant trend of recent years, but it has so far had little impact on Australian labour history, and even less on the history of radical political thought and organisation. This paper analyses one strand of Australian radical thought -- ethical socialism -- and seeks to illuminate the manner in which British radical ideas have been received and adapted in the antipodes, shaping radical intellectuals' conceptions of the social and the self in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Australia.