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WHO WAS FREDERICK ALLEN? 
 
Thanks to a friend's kindness I recently acquired a copy of CAN CAPITALISM LAST? by
Frederick Allen (Left Book Club, 1938); he had bought it at a 'trash and treasure' sale.
It certainly counts as treasure, being a literate and sophisticated defence of the 'low-
wage underconsumption' version of Marxian crisis theory that was very popular in both the
Second and Third Internationals. The author evidently has some training in economics,
being familiar with both Marshall and Keynes (the TREATISE, alas, gets more attention than
the GENERAL THEORY).
 
The usually reliable catalogue of the La Trobe University library claims that the author
is Frederick Lewis Allen, the liberal US journalist who wrote ONLY YESTERDAY and THE LORDS
OF CREATION, inter alia. This, though, is clearly wrong. Internal evidence suggests that
the man I am after is British rather than American. There is no reference to CAN
CAPITALISM LAST? or to Marx in the 300-page biography of F.L. Lewis (Darwin Payne, THE MAN
OF ONLY YESTERDAY, Harper and Row, 1975), and he studied English, not economics.
 
Who, then, was Frederick Allen? I have consulted all the usual reference books, in vain
(WHO WAS WHO; Bellamy and Saville, DICTIONARY OF LABOUR BIOGRAPHY; John Lewis's history of
the Labour Book Club; the standard histories of the Communist Party of Great Britain and
the Independent Labour Party; Sheila Hodges's history of the Gollancz publishing house),
and am none the wiser. He was not the son of the ILP activist Clifford Allen, who died
without male heir. The book was not reviewed in the EJ or AER, and there is no 'Frederick
Allen' in the index to the Keynes collected works. The British Museum catalogue lists him
as a 'Writer on Economics', which is true but distinctly unhelpful. It has a handful of
other Frederick Allens (no middle name or intial), including a Classics Master at King
Edward's Grammar School, Birmingham, a psychotherapist and an 'arts organiser'. The former
is, I suppose, a possible candidate, as at one point my Allen cites an anecdote from a
1937 Conference of the National Federation of Class Teachers (p. 13).  But it's a long
shot.
 
I'd be very grateful for any information about this mysterious author, or ideas  as to
where else I might look. Archival research will be difficult from the southern hemisphere,
but all suggestions will be gratefully considered.
 
John King 
 
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