The Fabian Society began in 1884 as a forum for Britain’s reformist socialists. The society helped start the Labour Representation Committee, which gave birth to the Labour Party in 1906. The society grew along with the party, and by the late 1990s it had become a hangout for Tony Blair and an incubator of Third Way policies. Friedrich Engels may have been onto something when he described the Fabians to Karl Marx as “a clique of bourgeois-Socialists  . . . united only by their fear of the threatening rule of the workers.”

The Fabians did, however, produce a memorable work of socialist and religious aesthetics: a stained-glass window that depicts society members as worker-saints, both praying for and hammering out the “new world.”