George Douglas Howard Cole (25 September 1889 – 14 January 1959) was an English political theorist, economist, historian, and novelist.

[2] Cole was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a First in Classical Moderations in 1910 and a First in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1912.

Having secured exemption from military service, Cole was practically active first with his union work and with journalism in defence of workers' rights;[4]: 61–73  he also found time to develop a political theory of guild socialism.

Though his contributions were well informed and generally readable, and though, so far as my knowledge goes, their accuracy went unchallenged, he was quite incapable of giving to the Guardian that priority of service and attention which any good newspaperman must give to his paper; and I very clearly recollect the amazed exasperation displayed on more than one occasion by the London Editor, or the Night Editor as the case might be, when a piece of news requiring instant comment had turned up, and their Labour Correspondent was not available on the telephone, had gone out, nobody knew where, or for how long[4]: 105 Cole authored several economic and historical works including biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen.

[2] He was listed in Nazi Germany's Black Book of prominent subjects to be arrested in the case of a successful invasion of Britain.

These ideas he put forward in The New Age before and during the First World War and also in the pages of The New Statesman, the weekly founded by the Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw.

Cole said his interest in socialism was kindled by his reading News from Nowhere, the utopian novel by William Morris, writing: I became a Socialist because, as soon as the case for a society of equals, set free from the twin evils of riches and poverty, mastership and subjection, was put to me, I knew that to be the only kind of society that could be consistent with human decency and fellowship and that in no other society could I have the right to be content.Neither a Marxist nor a social democrat, Cole envisioned a guild socialism of decentralised association and active, participatory democracy, whose basic units would be sited at the workplace and in the community rather than in any central apparatus of the state.

Cole criticized both state socialism and syndicalism as leaving open the possibility of tyranny, and envisioned a form of socialism where all enterprises would be democratically run by the workers through trade unions with the state remaining to guarantee consumers' rights and civil liberties.

Cole's ideas were influential in intellectual circles but were generally dismissed by Labour Party leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald.

[11] Cole also was a powerful influence on the life of the young Harold Wilson, whom he taught, worked with and convinced to join the Labour Party.

He and his wife, Margaret Cole, together wrote 29 popular detective stories,[14] featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr. Tancred.

In economic terms, it could be said that "it would be better to let Hitler conquer all Europe short of the Soviet Union, and thereafter exploit it ruthlessly in the Nazi interest, than to go back to the pre-war order of independent Nation States with frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the natural units of production and exchange".

William Rose (Victor Gollancz, 1931) along with other leading authorities of the time, including Roger Fry, C. G. Seligman, Maurice Dobb and F. J. C. Hearnshaw.

[2] Cole and his wife jointly wrote a number of books and articles, including twenty-nine detective stories.

[4]: 35  His dislike of all forms of hierarchy and hatred of ritual led to atheism at an early age, though he never engaged in anti-religious polemics.

Though he enjoyed classical music, he regarded the radio as making a horrible noise[4]: 47  Almost allergic to higher mathematics (he did not understand Algebra) he distrusted science, as he believed it was being used to quantify things that were best left to interpretation.

[4]: 34 In literature and poetry he enjoyed (after Morris) Defoe, Swift, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Cobbett, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Butler, but he found Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle pretentious.

[22] In lieu of religious rites his brother-in-law, Raymond Postgate, read two passages from the works of William Morris at his funeral in Golders Green Crematorium.