By its interest in pluralism, the Czechoslovak reappraisal of politics and socialism invites, I believe, comparison with earlier attempts to combine socialism with pluralism, notably those associated with English guild socialism. Without wishing to imply that the Czechoslovak pluralists aimed at a revival of guild socialism, I do think it of interest that, like their English “precursors,” they saw the “natural” unfolding of socialism in the direction of pluralism, in one form or another. Consequently, the course that the actual development had taken in the wake of the revolutionary transformation of Czechoslovak society failed, in their view, to coincide with the natural development. Somehow, what in fact had happened was not what should have happened.

Principally, therefore, I wish to explore two questions in this chapter. One is the fundamental issue concerning the link between socialism and pluralism in the form envisaged by English socialist pluralists, notably H. J. Laski and G. D. H. Cole. The other concerns the claim that “wrong turns” were taken after the establishment of socialism in Czechoslovakia, which prevented the linkage between socialism and pluralism. To explore these two questions may help to explain why, in the second half of the century, socialist pluralists in Czechoslovakia were inclined to lean on ideas of their own country's political past rather than on ideas of the English socialist pluralists of the first half of the century.

As a matter of historical record, socialism and pluralism have only rarely converged in the past.