A sensitive analysis of the thought and intellectual development of G. D. H. Cole (1889 1959) the distinguished Labour historian. Cole's career is traced from his earliest days in the Labour movement to his final years as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at Oxford. Professor Carpenter examines Cole's role in the creation of Guild Socialism; his work in the early 1920s when after the decline of Guild Socialism, he turned towards the analysis of policies, research through the New Statesman and the New Fabian Research Bureau and teaching at Oxford; his attempts to provide a policy for the Left in the 1930s, the idea of economic planning and the Popular Front; his activities during the Second World War; and his place in the debates over the Labour movement's cause after the 1945 government. Finally Professor Carpenter discusses Cole's courageous recognition, towards the end of his life, that Socialism had not come and his attempts to start a new cycle of research in one of the first efforts to create a New Left.