Max Beer's History of Socialism is a classic, not only because it was a brilliant pioneering study, but also because it is still urgently relevant to a new generation of socialists. Just as Beatrice Webb complained that her comrades had "borrowed" it, while Tawney celebrated it in a justly famous essay, so today there are many who will treasure its radical insights into the ideas of these British thinkers, many of whom have long been ignored or forgotten in most of our schools and some of our universities.

This major anthology spans 500 years of radical protest from the Peasants’ Revolt to the First World War. Provides an alternative political and social history of England. This is history as creative defiance, as communal action, involving the intellectual and imaginative witnesses of those among the privileged poets, writers, and thinkers who have had the strength and courage to make themselves passionate spokesmen for the dispossessed.