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ABSTRACT
The British political theorist and architect Arthur J. Penty (1875-1937) is today remembered as the co-originator of ‘post-industrialism’ and as the first guild socialist. His writings evince a lifelong aversion to the evils of commercial society, as well as an intense appreciation for Medieval life. Yet Penty's conservative tendencies belie his attentiveness to what Harold Perkin would call ‘professional society.’ Though he abhorred capitalism, Penty believed in assigning status to workers on the basis of social function and technical expertise. Most surprisingly, given his reputation, he held that the guarantee of such status represented the first step towards a more democratic society. This essay accordingly recasts Penty as a political theorist of the professions. It does so through the analysis of not only his core interventions in political theory, but also his lesser-known trade writings. The first section focuses on Penty's early life and context. The second explains his historical understanding of architectural decline through his contrasting narratives of Classical and Gothic aesthetics. The third section outlines his theory of how to restore democratic architecture in modernity. The fourth section comments on Penty's larger significance in the history of ideas at a time of increasing populist references to ‘traditional’ aesthetics.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Jan-Werner Müller, Gregory Conti, Edward Baring, Nikhil Menezes, Théophile Deslauriers, Stuart Middleton, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Arthur J. Penty, Old Worlds for New: A Study of the Post-Industrial State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917), 155.
2 David Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty (1875–1937) and the Legacy of 19th-Century English Domestic Architecture’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 46, no. 4 (December, 1987): 339.
3 Arthur J. Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1906).
4 Frank Matthews, ‘The Ladder of Becoming: A.R. Orage, A.J. Penty and the Origins of Guild Socialism in England’, in Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville, ed. David E. Martin and David Rubenstein (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 164, footnote 7.
5 See, for example, S. G. Hobson, National Guilds: An Inquiry in the Wage System and a Way Out, ed. A. R. Orage (London: G. Bell & Sons Limited, 1914), and G. D. H. Cole, Self-Government in Industry (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1972) [1920].
6 Bell acknowledged Penty’s early use of the term, although he did not reference Penty’s earliest invocation of ‘post-industrialism.’ Penty himself credited Coomaraswamy with actually coining the term. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 37, fn. 45. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Arthur. J. Penty, Essays in Post-Industrialism: A Symposium of Prophecy Concerning the Future of Society (London: T.N. Foulis, 1914). See also Howard Brick, ‘Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s’, American Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1992): 348–80.
7 Quoted in Mark Swenarton, Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought (London: Macmillan, 1989), 171. Also quoted at length in Edward J. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty: His Contribution to Social Thought (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1941), 37–9.
8 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Preface’, in Arthur J. Penty, Post-Industrialism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), 7.
9 As this list of languages suggests, Penty’s reception proved especially warm amongst fascists. As David Reisman observes, he received especially damning praise from one Nazi commenter, who wrote: ‘Penty und Hitler weisen den we in die zunkunft.’ David Reisman, ‘Introduction’, in Democratic Socialism in Britain, Volume V: Classic Texts in Economic and Political Thought, 1825–1952, ed. David Reisman (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996), xxi. Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 167, 169.
10 See Nakami Mari, In Pursuit of Composite Beauty: Yanagi Soetsu, His Aesthetics, and Aspiration for Peace (Hongo: University of Tokyo Press, 2011), Ralph Adams Cram, ‘Machines and Men’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 10, no. 12 (December 1922), 399–401, and William L. Steele, ‘Reforming’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 12, no. 1 (January 1924): 42–3.
11 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; III’, Architecture: The Journal of the Society of Architects 3, no. 27 (January 1925), 116.
12 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; I’, Architecture: The Journal of the Society of Architects 3, no. 25 (November 1924): 23.
13 Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; III’, 116–7.
14 Ibid., 117.
15 Ibid., 119–20.
16 Ibid., 119.
17 Penty likely arrived at this view in conversation with Cram, who supposedly informed him that ‘architecture is encouraged in American [sic] by a spirit of rivalry in which everyone feels he must have the best.’ This quotation comes from an article in The Journal of the American Institute of Architects that reproduces many of the passages of ‘Where Architecture is Alive’. Arthur J. Penty, ‘Architecture in the United States’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 12, no. 11 (November, 1924): 473–8.
18 Valerio Torreggiani, ‘Corporatism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Three Alternatives for a Post-Liberal Order’, Contemporary European History 31, no. 3 (August, 2022): 385.
19 S.T. Glass, referencing The Restoration, likewise writes that Penty intended ‘to put the clock back 400 years and establish a closed and virtually stationary economy of handicrafts and agriculture.’ A.W. Wright, G.D.H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 79. S.T. Glass, The Responsible Society: The Ideas of the English Guild Socialists (London: Longmans, Green & Co. LTD, 1966), 20.
20 Kiernan, too, seems to view Penty’s overarching contribution to social theory as the subordination of the material to the spiritual. Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 179. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty.
21 The full extent of Penty’s warmth towards fascist Italy remains unclear though obviously significant. Some scholars have avoided identifying him too strongly with fascism despite his comments on Italy and connection to Collins. As Kiernan writes, Penty perhaps ‘has not been very discriminating in his analysis of Fascism. Notwithstanding his absolute condemnation of the Totalitarian State and his displeasure with its imperialistic ambitions in the face of an avowedly nationalistic programme, any evaluation of Fascism based on its philosophy will, almost certainly, be bound to be misleading.’ Corrin gives a similar gloss: Penty ‘held that Italian Fascists were putting into practice the principles of the Rerum Novarum. Like many pluralists’, he continues, ‘Penty took Mussolini’s corporatist constitution at face value and believed it similar to his own vision of Distributism.’ Reisman proves more even handed. ‘Penty’, he writes in relation to the architect’s warm reception by Nazis in Germany, ‘is a one-off original whose ideas are by no means easy to pigeonhole. It would be fair to say that the Fascists were as one dimensional about his theories as he was taken in by the eloquence of their propaganda.’ Others tend to invoke Penty as a thoroughgoing supporter of Oswald Mosley. Dorril names him as a member of the BUF (though without citation). Tom Steele repeats this claim. Penty’s son, Michael Penty, did write for BUF publications. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty, 34–5. Jay Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 191. Reisman, ‘Introduction’, xxi. Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 76, 251. Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 169. Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923 (London: Scolar Press, 1990), 229.
22 W.H. Greenleaf, ‘Laski and British Socialism’, History of Political Thought 2, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 580.
23 One unsung exception to this trend is Michael Easson, whose master’s dissertation on Penty (which features as a good bibliography for the architect) presents him as a forefather of sustainable development. He is also the only scholar, by my lights, to have considered Penty’s comments on skyscrapers. Michael Easson, ‘A.J. Penty and the Spaces of Hope’, unpublished MSc Dissertation in Sustainable Urban Development. Oxford University Department of Continuing Education (2012).
24 Margaret Rose has anticipated my pragmatic reading of Penty. ‘Although Penty has been criticised is more recent years as offering a reactionary and unrealistic vision of the new post-industrial society as one in which the industrialism of the past will be “broken-up,”’ she writes, ‘his specification of the central issues of both industrialism and post-industrialism as the regulation of machines and the sub-division of labour between both persons and machines has been one which has continued to feature in the most recent theories of post-industrial society.’ Yet Rose also affirms that Penty saw little use for scientists or professionals in the post-industrial future. Consider, too, Kiernan’s passing statement that ‘Penty’s attitude on the machine was certainly one of intense realism, not emotional reaction. To categorize his social theory as anti-mechanistic would do him to a severe injustice.’ Margaret A. Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 24, 29. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty, 89.
25 See Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Peril of Large Organisations I’, The New Age 10, no. 11 (January 11th, 1912): 247–9. Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Peril of Large Organisations II’, The New Age 10, no. 12 (January 18th, 1912): 272–4. Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Peril of Large Organisations III’, The New Age 10, no. 13 (January 25th, 1912): 296–9.
26 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 2002), 2–3.
27 Contrast my view with that of Saler, who lists Penty as a ‘Medieval antimodernist.’ Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24.
28 For more on Penty and the importance of status, see Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty, 49–53, 73–7.
29 I am hardly the first to use this term. See, for example, Alexandra Warwick, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris’, in The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 122. See also Rosemary Jann, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980): 129–49, especially 141–7.
30 I thank Théophile Deslauriers for this formulation of Penty as a theorist of democracy rather than as a democrat himself.
31 Reisman, ‘Introduction’, vii.
32 As Thistlewood reports, ‘among the earliest documents in his surviving papers is a systematic collection and critique of illustrations of the work of Norman Shaw, compiled during Penty’s teenage years.’ In Penty’s own words, ‘I remember when a pupil I first became acquainted with the designs of Norman Shaw how completely they revolutionized any ideas I had of architecture.’ Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty’, 328. Arthur J. Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture II—The Vernacular Movement’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 14, no. 9 (October 1926), 423.
33 Penty, Old Worlds for New, 157. Elizabeth M. Keslacy, ‘Architecture’s Maternity: Conceiving the Mother of the Arts in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Architectural Theory Review 26 (2022), footnote 52. See also Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock, Architecture—Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 38–88.
34 T.G. Jackson et alia, ‘To the President and Council of the Royal Institute of British Artists’, in Architecture: A Profession or an Art? Thirteen Essays on the Qualifications and Training of Architects, ed. R. Norman Shaw and T.G. Jackson (London: John Murray, 1892), xxxiv.
35 William Morris, ‘The Influence of Building Materials Upon Architecture. Delivered Before The Art Workers’ Guild at Barnard’s Inn Hall, London, January, 1892’, in The Collected Works of William Morris with Introductions by His Daughter May Morris, Volume XXII (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1914), 405.
36 William Whyte, ‘Memorialists’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2007): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/96544.
37 Jackson et alia, ‘To the President and Council of the Royal Institute of British Artists’, xxxiv.
38 W.R. Lethaby, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’, in Architecture: A Profession or an Art? Thirteen Essays on the Qualifications and Training of Architects, ed. R. Norman Shaw and T.G. Jackson (London: John Murray, 1892), 152–3.
39 Penty would reprise this language some years later. Lethaby, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’, 161.
40 Lethaby, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’, 163.
41 W. R. Lethaby, ‘Arts and the Function of Guilds’, in W.R. Lethaby, Form in Civilization: Collected Papers on Art & Labour (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 201–7. See also Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 96–125.
42 W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (New York: Macmillan & Co, 1892).
43 Matthews, ‘The Ladder of Becoming’, 147–66.
44 Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder and Other Plays, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor (London: Penguin, 1958).
45 For more, see Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club.
46 Penty, Old Worlds for New, 145.
47 Ibid.
48 Matthews, ‘The Ladder of Becoming’, 151.
49 Ironically, however, Penty later joined the ‘distributists.’ Niles Carpenter, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), 82.
50 Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 170. See also Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty’, 330, footnote 3.
51 Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty’, 327.
52 Ibid., 329–30.
53 Matthews, ‘The Ladder of Becoming’, 151.
54 Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 167, 170.
55 Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty’, 339, fn. 25.
56 As Matthews observes, Orage recalled that the draft contained materials that Penty might have written in 1900. Matthews, ‘The Ladder of Becoming’, 153, 167, footnote 10. Carpenter, Guild Socialism, 82–3.
57 Recounted in Carpenter, Guild Socialism, 82–3, and Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 171–3.
58 Carpenter, Guild Socialism, 82–3. Thistlewood, ‘A.J. Penty’, 333.
59 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture IV: The Classical Revival’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 14, no. 12 (December 1926): 508.
60 Arthur J. Penty, A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), 13–14.
61 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture I—The Gothic Revival’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 14, no. 9 (September, 1926): 382.
62 Arthur J. Penty, Post-Industrialism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), 150–1.
63 Penty, Post-Industrialism, 150–1.
64 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture IV’, 509.
65 Penty, Post-Industrialism, 151.
66 Penty recalls Ruskin’s Seven Lamps here. As Swenarton explains, ‘the seventh lamp, Obedience, returned to the notion of art as a language, and demanded that architects should learn to speak the existing language of the Gothic before they thought of inventing a new language of their own.’ Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 17.
67 Penty, Post-Industrialism, 124.
68 Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture I. An Economic Forecast’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 8, (January 1920): 59.
69 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture I’, 380.
70 Penty, Old Worlds for New, 157–62. For Penty on Lethaby, see Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture II. The Failure of the English Vernacular Revival’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects (April 1920): 145–50.
71 A. R. Orage, ‘Politics for Craftsmen’, The Contemporary Review (June, 1907): 791.
72 Raymond de Roover, ‘The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy’, The Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (December, 1958): 418.
73 This is not to say that traditions, like languages, did not require centuries to take shape. Penty followed Lethaby in this regard. Penty, The Restoration, 48, footnote 1. W.R. Lethaby, Mediæval Art: From the Peace of the Church to the Eve of the Renaissance, 312–1350 (London: Duckworth and Co., 1904), 50.
74 Emphasis my own. Penty, The Restoration, 49.
75 Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 1–31. See also J. C. Berendzen, ‘Institutional Design and Public Space: Hegel, Architecture, and Democracy’, Journal of Social Philosophy 39, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 291–307.
76 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture I’, 380.
77 Penty, The Restoration, 53.
78 Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture III’, 209.
79 Penty, The Restoration, 53.
80 Ibid., 54.
81 Penty found similar fault in technical schools outside of the university system that instructed future craftsmen in the manual trades. As he purported said in an interview, such schools ‘are no substitute at all for apprenticeship. Boys all learning together in a class do not pass on in a rational way from stage to stage: they learn en masse and so there is no real individual growth.’ Although schools provided theoretical instruction, ‘there is no substitute for the sound practical training given by apprenticeship.’ Quoted in Ernest Binfield Havell, The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India (Adyar: The Theosophist Office, 1912), 191. The original source is lost.
82 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture I’, 381.
83 Penty, Old Worlds for New, 49.
84 Penty, Post-Industrialism, 132.
85 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture I’, 381.
86 Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture II’, 145.
87 For more, see Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 85–95.
88 Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture II’, 146, 150.
89 Penty, ‘Authority and Liberty in Architecture II’, 424.
90 Penty, Post-Industrialism, 149–151. Emphasis my own.
91 Ibid.
92 Penty, however, did not favour economic ‘cross-fertilization.’ Arthur J. Penty, ‘Architecture versus Engineering IV: Cross-Fertilization of Styles’, The Architect’s Journal 73 (March 4th, 1931), 348. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty, 125–6.
93 Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture I’, 59.
94 Ibid., 58. See also Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture II’, 145–50, Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture III. The Nature of Architecture’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects (June 1920): 208–12, Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture IV. A Theory of the Picturesque’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects (July 1920): 253–4, and Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture—A Theory of the Picturesque.—II’, The Architect 104 (November 5th, 1920), 296[?]–8.
95 Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 55.
96 Penty’s writings seem to ignore Geddes. This absence might derive, Swenarton’s historical scholarship suggests, from the Ruskinian tradition’s centre of gravity residing in Southern England rather than Geddes’ native Scotland. Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, xix-xvii. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams and Norgate, 2015).
97 Murdo Macdonald, ‘Celticism and Internationalism in the Circle of Patrick Geddes’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005): 69–83. A copy of A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History sits in Geddes’ papers at the University of Strathclyde
98 I thank my anonymous reviewer for invoking Geddes. Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 69.
99 Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 298.
100 Carl S. Joslyn, ‘The British Building Guilds: A Critical Survey of Two Years’ Work’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 37, no. 1 (November 1922): 77–8. Frank Matthews, ‘The Building Guilds’, in Essays in Labour History, 1886–1923, ed. Asa Briggs and John Saville (Hamden: Archon Books, 1971), 297. See also Kevin Morgan, ‘The Problem of the Epoch? Labour and Housing 1918–51’, Twentieth Century British History 16, no. 3 (2005): 227–55 and Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 179–80.
101 Swenarton, Artisans and Architects, 187.
102 Carpenter, Guild Socialism, 119.
103 See, for example, Arthur J. Penty, ‘Architecture versus Engineering III: The Case for and against Concrete Architecture’, The Architects’ Journal 73, no. 1884 (February 25th, 1931): 312–4.
104 Arthur J. Penty, The Elements of Domestic Design (Westminster: The Architectural Press, 1930), 92.
105 Penty, Elements, 92.
106 Penty, Elements, 92.
107 Penty, Elements, 93.
108 Penty, ‘The Crisis in Architecture II’, 209.
109 Ibid.
110 Arthur J. Penty, ‘The Restoration of Beauty to Life III’, The New Age (May 16th, 1907), 37.
111 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Architecture versus Engineering I: The Battleground Surveyed’, The Architects’ Journal (February 11th, 1931): 239–41.
112 Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; III’, 118–20.
113 Note the implicit inversion of ‘democracy emanating outward from craftsmen who know what they are about.’ Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; III’, 119.
114 Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; III’, 118–20.
115 Penty, ‘Where Architecture is Alive; I’, 25.
116 Arthur J. Penty, ‘Review of Books: Sticks and Stones’, The Sociological Review 17, no. 1 (1925): 69–70.
117 See a notable exception in Jan-Werner Müller, ‘What (if Anything) Is ‘Democratic Architecture?’’, in Political Theory and Architecture, ed. Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
118 Jennifer Forestal, ‘The Architecture of Political Spaces: Trolls, Digital Media, and Deweyan Democracy’, American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (February, 2017): 151.
119 Joan Ockman, ‘What is Democratic Architecture? The Public Life of Buildings’, Dissent 58, no. 4 (Fall, 2011): 65.
120 Frank Lloyd Wright, When Democracy Builds, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 139.
121 Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Populist Architecture Is a Problem That Will Outlive Populists’, Foreign Policy (May 20th, 2023), https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/20/populist-architecture-turkey-hungary-italy-erdogan-orban-modi/
122 S.G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left: Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1938), 176. See also Morgan, ‘The Problem’, 151.