Webb Sidney

In Methods of Social Study Sidney and Beatrice Webb describe in detail how they conducted their investigations into social history and institutions - from the collection, recording and classification of the data (both documentary and oral), through the processes of hypothesis and analysis, down to the preparation of the final report. The Webbs were in many respects pioneers, and what they achieved and the way in which they achieved it are of an importance that has been increasingly recognised as the passage of times gives us perspective. Their constant concern was to ensure that their work would be 'scientific'. They stress the need in scientific research for complete objectivity, to be achieved in their case by keeping their historical and sociological studies wholly separate from their political writings. Because the first drafts for the book were made by Beatrice in 1921 and the final text was written by Sidney in 1931/2, one can also see expressed here, more clearly than elsewhere, the different temperaments of the two collaborators.

The Webbs were a unique partnership. Their idea of 'the inevitability of gradualness' dominated the Fabian Society and Labour thinking for half a century, though their theory of political permeation also led them into close association with Liberal and Conservative politicians. They were scholars as well as propagandists, writing massive histories of trade unionism and local government, and the famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law which paved the way for the welfare state. They were the founders of the London School of Economics and of the New Statesman. This crowded public life is reflected in the hundreds of letters they exchanged in their long lifetimes, as well as in their correspondence with many of the outstanding personalities of their day, including Herbert Asquith, Joseph Chamberlain, William Beveridge, E. M. Forster, R. B. Haldane, J. M. Keynes, Ramsay MacDonald, Alfred Marshall, Sydney Olivier, G. B. Shaw, Charlotte Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Samuel, Herbert Spencer, Graham Wallas, H. G. Wells and Leonard Woolf.

In Methods of Social Study Sidney and Beatrice Webb describe in detail how they conducted their investigations into social history and institutions - from the collection, recording and classification of the data (both documentary and oral), through the processes of hypothesis and analysis, down to the preparation of the final report. The Webbs were in many respects pioneers, and what they achieved and the way in which they achieved it are of an importance that has been increasingly recognised as the passage of times gives us perspective. Their constant concern was to ensure that their work would be 'scientific'. They stress the need in scientific research for complete objectivity, to be achieved in their case by keeping their historical and sociological studies wholly separate from their political writings. Because the first drafts for the book were made by Beatrice in 1921 and the final text was written by Sidney in 1931/2, one can also see expressed here, more clearly than elsewhere, the different temperaments of the two collaborators.