----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]