A recent biography of Clement Attlee presents a figure fully as admirable—and, in some ways, more so—as Winston Churchill. Photograph by Popperfoto / Getty

For anyone with what used to be called “progressive tendencies,” the best, if largely overlooked, book of last year was surely John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, the leader of the British Labour Party through the Second World War, and then Prime Minister in the first great postwar Labour government. Titled “Citizen Clem” in Britain (Oxford University Press published it here as “Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain”), it is a study in actual radical accomplishment with minimal radical afflatus—a story of how real social change can be achieved, providing previously unimaginable benefits to working people, entirely within an embrace of parliamentary principles as absolute and as heroic as any in the annals of democracy.

Attlee was an unprepossessing man. “A modest man with much to be modest about,” Winston Churchill said of him once. Attlee had a modest mustache and came from a modest family, and had a modest demeanor—so much so that his modesty made him almost a joke figure. Even when he was Prime Minister, one wit noted that “an empty taxi drew up to 10 Downing Street and Attlee got out.” He was always regarded impatiently, even patronizingly, by his more charismatic colleagues on the left. Yet what emerges from this biography is a figure fully as admirable in his way—and, in some significant ways, more so—as the much-portrayed Churchill, who, teasing aside, came to admire Attlee as much as Attlee admired him. (Attlee actually fought at Gallipoli during the First World War, following Churchill’s maligned strategic initiative there—one that Attlee, though he saw it fail firsthand, always thought sound and daring, and undermined by its execution.)

After the war, Attlee went to work as what would now be called a community organizer in the London slum of Stepney, which remained his spiritual home for the rest of his life. Bew, a professor of history and foreign policy at King’s College, London, reminds us that Attlee came of age at a time when Marx was seen as only one, and not the most important, of the fathers of the socialist ideal. Attlee, who saw through and rejected the Soviet totalitarian model early, schooled himself on the British alternatives—on the works of William Morris and Edward Bellamy, who dreamed of rebelling against the regimentation that was implicit in the industrialized system rather than of simply switching around the hands that controlled it. William Blake was one of the names that Attlee most often cited. (It was he, as much as anyone, who made Blake’s mystic poem “Jerusalem” the anthem of the Labour Party.) This vision was in many ways unreal, but the unreality blossomed in practical terms: Attlee saw socialism as the pursuit of a nameably better life, not as a search for another master. “Citizenship” was his key term, and the ideal, as Bew explains, was one in which “the state and the individual needed to serve in the name of a broader democratic community.” Working his way through Labour’s already madly factional squabbles and splits, Attlee became leader by virtue of his obvious integrity and his ability to talk to all sides. (Then as now, purism was the affliction of the progressive-minded, with instant annihilation and excommunication promised for anyone who departed from what was seen at that moment as the true dogma; against this, Attlee denounced anyone who would “criticize and condemn all methods of social advance that do not directly square with his formulae.”)

It was in the darkest days of 1940, though, that Attlee’s heroism and acuity came most to note. Attlee’s Labour Party had entered into a coalition government with Churchill’s Conservative Party when the Second World War broke out. Then, in late May of 1940, when the Conservative grandee Lord Halifax challenged Churchill, insisting that it was still possible to negotiate a deal with Hitler, through the good offices of Mussolini, it was the steadfast anti-Nazism of Attlee and his Labour colleagues that saved the day—a vital truth badly underdramatized in the current Churchill-centric film, “Darkest Hour,” as it has been in many a history book. (There were many, perhaps even a majority, on the Tory right more interested in preserving the peace and the British Empire than in opposing Hitler.) Had Labour been narrower in outlook, or implicitly pro-Soviet—at a time when Stalin was still tightly allied with Hitler—as were so many on the French left, the history of European civilization would be very different.

Attlee remained Churchill’s chief ally throughout the war, but he was far from a complaisant one. When Churchill and Roosevelt were considering their declaration of the Atlantic Charter, it was Attlee, acting with a celerity and a clarity of purpose that belied his reputation for caution, who insisted on including “freedom from want” as one of its aims, making economic rights and, with them, a decent life for all, one of the official aims of the war. He was a mumbler, but he was no ditherer.

In 1945, he led Labour to a stunning victory over Churchill, not ceasing for a moment in his admiration for his wartime role, nor ceding for a moment to what he perceived as his partner’s reactionary vision. (Churchill had the very bad idea in the campaign of attacking Labour as a quasi-totalitarian party, which everyone knew was nonsense.) The achievements of the first Labour government are still rightly legendary: a government that actually contained as ministers seven men who had begun their adult lives as working coal miners, brought in national health insurance, made the provision of housing central to its ends, and fought and mostly won the battle against unemployment. Imperfect as its accomplishments were—the virtues of nationalization proved less absolute than the ideologues imagined—it nonetheless empowered the working classes and, Bew writes, “set the ethical terms on which Britain’s new social contract was founded.” It is still a social contract in many ways intact, and was the background for the extraordinary cultural renaissance of working-class Britain in the nineteen-sixties and beyond. The Beatles begin here.

Of course, Attlee, like any leader in a democracy, was far from perfect. He was as baffled about what to do in the Middle East as everyone else, but his eventual insistence on a parliamentary model in an independent India did mean that India, with all its vagaries and ups and downs, emerged into modernity with a stable polity and what are, by historical standards, minimal civil violence, at least since the war of partition that was part of its birth—certainly compared to the massacres and imposed famines of the Chinese experiment.

At a moment when, for the first time in several generations, social democracy and even socialism itself are not dirty words but possible currents in American life, Attlee’s life recalls what real socialism is and can accomplish. After reading Bew’s book, one can’t help but think about the number of T-shirts sold here over the years bearing an image of Che (innumerable), compared with those bearing an image of Clem (presumably zero.) Yet one was a fanatic who helped make an already desperately violent and impoverished region still more violent and impoverished—and who believed in “hatred as an element of struggle”—and the other a quiet man who helped make a genuine revolution, achieving almost everything that Marx had dreamed of for the British working classes without a single violent civil act intervening. It reminds one that the true progressive giants are radicals of the real—those who accept that democracy implies pluralism, and that a plural society is self-evidently made up of many people and kinds, only a few of them truly exploitative and criminal, most just pursuing their own version of the good life as tradition and conviction has offered it to them. The oscillation of power among them is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of life. Attlee’s example reminds us that it is possible to hold to moral absolutes—there was no peace possible with Hitler, and it was better to go down fighting than to try to make one—alongside an appetite for conciliation so abundant as to be more prolific, in William Blake’s positive sense, than merely pragmatic. This might be a good year to start selling T-shirts with a picture of this modest man, and the word “Clem!” upon them.