“A true businessman does not waste time writing reflections about business.” Fortunately Auguste Detoeuf disregarded his own self-mocking advice. Throughout his life this thoughtful industrialist articulated the debates and dilemmas of an entire generation of businessmen, especially of other enlightened corporation managers who, like himself, were faced with the problems of industrial modernization and labor relations. The business milieu generally, preoccupied with its own affairs and not inclined to reveal them, provides but few glimpses into the minds and sensibilities which compose it. Detoeuf broke the silence; moreover, his shrewd analyses, unique moral perspective, and wide experience made him a remarkable historical witness to a time of troubles and fundamental change. He provided a rich record of the passage of French employers from the vogue of Americanization in the 1920's, through the crise de conscience provoked by the depression, the Popular Front, and Nazi aggression, up to the new resolve of the Liberation era.

E. P. Thompson expressed succinctly the prevailing orthodoxy about the origins of the Independent Labour Party when he wrote, in his homage to Tom Maguire, that “the ILP grew from bottom up”. From what little evidence has been available, it has been argued that the ILP was essentially a provincial party, which was created from the fusion of local political groups concentrated mainly on an axis lying across the North of England. An early report from the General Secretary of the party described Lancashire and Yorkshire as the strongholds of the movement, and subsequent historical accounts have supported this view.

Matters of labour organisation and control are clearly related to the progress of mechanisation. Economic growth results from increases in productivity brought about by management's combination of trained men and “skillful” machines in productive work. In isolation neither management, labour, nor capital can in themselves achieve sustained growth in the output of goods and services; the efficient co-ordination of a trained and disciplined workforce with equipment designed to perform specific activities is always required. In a period of changing technology such as the nineteenth century, however, the proper co-ordination may be difficult to achieve because the introduction of workers with new talents or machines which can perform multiple functions is apt to disturb existing work routines, upset prevailing cost relationships, and force management to reorganise entire sections of the productive process. This is particularly true if the various functions performed by new types of machinery have hitherto been assigned to more than one man or group of men.

The science of anthropology has traditionally studied the relations of the human kind to nature and the relations within society, the original animal condition of the human being, the preservation and overcoming thereof, the establishment of human culture, and its material, mental or artistic expression. Anthropology is founded on the presupposition of the variety of human societies and cultures, the differences between them, and the varieties in the developments and relations of each. It is an academic discipline above all, and has no internal commitment to practical undertakings. At best it has nurtured liberal spirits who embraced the “party of humanity”, and who have defended the concept of the whole against any expression of innate superiority of one group over another. It is an abstract social science which has only now separated itself from a spurious natural-science view of humanity, and this latter has given birth to a monster, the biology of racism, the reduction of cultural differences to natural or innate differences, and the assignment of these to a scale of higher or lower races. This academic anthropology did not strangle its offspring until long after it had done its harm.