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For adherents of what came to be known in the 1960s as systematic ideology, the current surge in support for right-wing populism would have come as no surprise. For them the expectation of working-class support for the Labour Party had always relied on the ‘illusion of mass rationality’ and ignored the ‘essentially irrational nature of mass behaviour’. Despite the apparent defeat of fascism in 1945, the far right would remain a threat as its ‘dynamic, emotional appeal’ aroused the ‘enthusiastic support of the masses who were largely uninterested in democratic politics’.

The system of ideas known as systematic ideology was developed by Harold Walsby and George Walford, self-educated theorists outside academia who gained a small but dedicated and enthusiastic group of followers in Britain and beyond in the post-war decades. Walsby earned his living as an artist-painter and was a Soho intellectual when he first began to formulate the theories that he called psycho-politics in the 1930s. Walford was a political objector, antiquarian bookseller and a brilliant dialectical thinker who pursued and developed Walsby’s ideas after the Second World War until his death in 1994.  

Their story, and the history of systematic ideology from the 1940s to the 1990s, is documented in a fascinating new archive which was gifted to Senate House Library in 2023, along with a generous donation to support its preservation by Richenda Walford (Walford’s daughter). Straddling psychology, politics and the wider social sciences, the archive contains source material that inspired their work, records of their interactions with political adversaries, manuscripts and pamphlets expounding their ideas and theories and correspondence with contemporary thinkers like George Orwell.

Both Walford and Walsby had been members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s but left it, disillusioned with the ‘sunshine propaganda’ of the inevitable triumph of socialism. In a stark challenge to the Party’s orthodox Marxist position, Walsby argued that political (and other) identifications were not determined by an individual’s economic position, but by their membership of one of six distinct ideological groups. A scientific approach was needed to analyse group characteristics and their implications for the nature and forms of human social and political consciousness. 

In 1944 the Association of Social Science was established to lead research into this new science. Fifty people joined up as members at the first meeting in the spring of 1945 and a membership of several hundred quickly built up. In 1947 Walsby’s psycho-political theory was set out in The Domain of Ideologies in 1947, establishing the analytical framework which Walford and others developed and later rechristened systematic ideology. 

As a theoretical model, systematic ideology neither supported nor opposed any of the political ideologies it analysed. Both the far right and the far left were regarded as inevitable elements of an ideological system, and their elimination was considered neither possible nor desirable. However, for a brief period during the 1940s, when the fascist threat loomed particularly large, the Association ran a political programme alongside its research programme: the Democratic Union. The movement was short-lived, but its aims were ambitious: to defend democracy and defeat fascism by taking advantage of the emotional suggestibility of the masses and uniting conservatives, liberals, socialists and communists.

Over the ten years of its existence, the Association brought out an impressive number of pamphlets and leaflets aiming to show the vital connection between Walsby’s analytical approach and the most urgent issues of the day, such as the fascist resurgence and the advent of atomic weapons. The Association’s pamphlet The Atom Bomb: what it really means for human society’ was one of the first publications to expose the dangers of the new era of the atom bomb after Hiroshima in August 1945. Such was the demand that by October of that year it was already in a third edition.

Despite the initial wider enthusiasm, however, active research was limited to a small core of committed devotees, and by the mid-1950s the organisation had run out of steam. After Walsby’s death in 1974 the Harold Walsby Society was formed to promote the study and development of his ideas. The Society established itself as lively discussion group interested in a wide range of matters related in various ways to Walsby’s intellectual concerns. Speakers from several academic and professional backgrounds presented to the Society on topics such as nationalism and fascism, Black Power in the Caribbean, television journalism, the student movement of the 1960s, and Jack London.

Walford was responsible for much of the Society’s printed output in its early years but by the late 1970s he had begun to question the purpose of the group, which ran under the slogan ‘Nothing is Absolutely True’. It had become little more than a sociological discussion group, according to Walford, who established a rival group, the Project for Systematic Ideology (PSI), with the provocative adage that ‘Everything is Relatively True’. PSI was short-lived, however, and was soon replaced by the more enduring project of a journal, 'Ideological Commentary', which Walford edited and produced from 1979 to 1994 and which had subscribers worldwide. By this time he had written countless research papers, articles, pamphlets, including The Intellectual and the People (1945), which attracted the interest of George Orwell, and published two books, Beyond Politics: an Outline of Systematic Ideology (1990) and Angles on Anarchism (1991).

Alongside the documentation of Walford and other systematic ideologists’ activities, the archive also contains the correspondence and memoranda of the radical left groups with whom they interacted, notably the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Industrial Workers of the World, and Common Wealth. It also contains engrossing exchanges with a broad range of political thinkers and writers, including psychologist John Rowan, anarchist John Hewetson, Scottish poet J.F. Hendry, secularist Francis Ambrose Ridley, Hegelian philosopher Arnold Vincent Miller and George Orwell.

The records of systematic ideology make a fascinating addition to the Library’s archive collections of far left political groups. The archive is open to all interested researchers to access in the Library’s Special Collections Reading Room and the online catalogue is .

By Clare George, SHL archivist