Allan Flanders was born in 1910 and died in 1973, after having contracted a disabling illness. As a colleague of Hugh Clegg, with whom he edited The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain in 1954, he was one of the founders of the ‘Oxford School’ of industrial relations (a label which its members usually rejected). Of this group of scholars, who dominated the ‘pluralist’ analysis of the 1950s and 1960s, Flanders stood out through his concern with questions of theory and his interest in American writing on the subject. (In a review of Industrial Relations Systems he wrote: ‘My sympathies are wholly with John Dunlop in choosing to spend his year on leave in Geneva to work on the theory of industrial relations.... What I doubt, having read the results of his work in this decidedly stimulating book, is whether a year was long enough.’) His attempt to write a broad theory of trade unionism was left incomplete. Two of his works were particularly influential: his 1966 book The Fawley Productivity Agreements and his 1967 essay Collective Bargaining: Prescription for Change. The latter, his evidence to the Donovan Commission, was decisive in forming the Commission’s conclusion that the institutions of British industrial relations required fundamental reconstruction, but that change could not be imposed through legislative fiat (as many politicians supposed); it required the voluntary assent of the key actors. Less well known was his curious political trajectory. For most of the last three decades of his life he edited Socialist Commentary, which became one of the most important vehicles of right-wing revisionism in the post-war Labour Party. Yet the route to this position was remarkable. In his late teens he encountered the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK, International Socialist League of Struggle or Militant Socialist International), a small German revolutionary group which rejected both capitalism and Marxism. The ISK shared with Leninism a belief in the revolutionary role of an elite cadre party, but drew from philosophers such as Kant an insistence on the ethical basis of social transformation and in the power of rational argument. It was also strongly anti-clerical, and committed to teetotalism and vegetarianism. In 1929 Flanders, who did not initially speak German, went to spend three years at the ISK cadre school. On his return he assumed leadership of the tiny British section, which adopted the name Socialist Vanguard. In this book, Kelly traces the route from left-wing revolutionary (albeit of an unusual kind) to right-wing social democrat. (A similar path was followed by the ISK leader, Willi Eichler, who in 1959 was the main author of the revisionist Bad Godesberg programme of the German social democrats, though Kelly does not discuss this.) The shift commenced shortly before the war, when Flanders became convinced, first that revolutionaries needed a concrete set of policy proposals, and second that there was no realistic alternative to working within the Labour Party. His persistent rejection of orthodox communism was reinforced by the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. The ISK, and Flanders, strongly supported the war against Nazi Germany. As the war proceeded, his revolutionary convictions gave way to the view that capitalism could be transformed from within, and that this was indeed occurring through a process of ‘planned capitalism’. The logical corollary was that a revolutionary party was now redundant, and indeed the ISK was dissolved at the end of the war, though the Socialist Vanguard group continued until 1950. Kelly regards the commitment to ethical socialism as an enduring element in Flanders’ views despite the radical alteration of other elements. But the meaning of these ethics was …