The general editor of the new Oxford World Classics multivolume series of selected works of Bernard Shaw had a difficult task when choosing an editor for this volume of Major Political Writings, and he succeeded in making a commendable choice in Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, a well-qualified literary scholar of the period, especially in terms of late Victorian journals and periodicals as author of Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (2013), in which Shaw figures prominently along with his friend and fellow socialist artist, William Morris. Unfortunately, the publisher of this volume made the decision to name its author as George Bernard Shaw, a version of his name Shaw explicitly ordained should not be used on the covers of his books. Such a misstep is unfortunate for an otherwise welcome publishing enterprise.Miller herself has made a well-chosen selection as explained in her useful introduction, but significant gaps forestall it being comprehensive. The main issues she faced were, in the first place, what to do with Shaw’s two lengthy books on politics, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) and Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944). Her selections from the latter accomplish little beyond bringing attention to the existence of a book unavailable in any recent edition, but which I have always found surprisingly readable as something of a Shavian compendium of knowledge. The more judicious selections from The Guide, Shaw’s political magnum opus, may tempt the reader into tackling the full work, although an impatient reader might prefer to read the included contemporaneous 1926 article “Socialism: Principles and Outlook,” which Shaw wrote for the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (reprinted in 1930 as Fabian Tract No. 233). Her second decision was whether to include minor pieces that offer insights into Shaw’s political thought not otherwise available. Again her inclusion of these is well-justified, especially selections from a late article like “In Praise of Guy Fawkes” (1932) that offers Shaw’s critique of Parliament: “the real function of Parliament in this country is to prevent anything being done by endlessly talking about it.”Perhaps most interesting of all are the earliest articles, dating back to when Shaw first joined the Fabian Society in 1884, shortly after it was founded. He had been attracted by the title of the Society’s first tract, “Why Are the Many Poor?,” and soon wrote its second tract, “A Manifesto,” the first piece included in this collection. In it he explains the need for socialism, writing memorably of “the division of Society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other,” while insisting as a feminist “that Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women.” At the same time, he became deeply interested in socialist economics, the subject of the next three pieces. Beginning as an orthodox Marxist (he read Das Kapital in French translation as no complete English version existed), he regularly attended economics workshops including one devoted to reading Marx’s Capital and another with several leading academic economists in attendance (Shaw would be one of the founder members at the 1890 inaugural meeting of the British Economics Association—now the Royal Economic Society).The key figure for Shaw’s economics education was the Rev. Phillip Wicksteed, one of those late Victorian polymaths—theologian, classicist, literary critic, Dante (and early Ibsen) scholar, and, like Shaw, an anti-vivisectionist as well as economist. Much influenced (again like Shaw) by Henry George, Wicksteed leaned toward socialism but rejected Marx’s economics, specifically the famous Labor Theory of Value, believing academic economist W. S. Jevons provided a more reliable explanation in terms of marginal utility. In the process of defending Marx, Shaw was converted to Wicksteed’s view, a learning journey that can be followed in the first two of the economics pieces included here. The third, probably Shaw’s most important contribution to the literature of economics, “The Basis of Socialism. Economic” (shortened to “Economic”), was published as a chapter in the landmark collection Fabian Essays (1889)—along with his paper “The Transition to Socialism” delivered around the same time to a meeting of the British Association, Economics section (omitted from this selection). Designed from the beginning for publication, all these Fabian essays (except for “Transition”) were adapted from a series of public lectures given in 1888 by the seven leading Fabians and edited by Shaw. Marking the high point of his first period as a Fabian Socialist, Fabian Essays became a surprise, runaway success, with tens of thousands of copies sold while remaining constantly in print during his lifetime.Shaw almost always turned his major political lectures and essays into Fabian tracts, a series of publications highly influential on twentieth-century British political and social life (and which American ideological conservatives since the Reagan era have, often explicitly, been contesting because, paradoxically, they seem to understand far better than liberals how successful the Fabians had been). As the leading member on the Society’s publishing committee, Shaw was the main driving force behind Fabian publishing, and Miller includes an interesting group of Shaw’s own Fabian tracts from the years 1890 to 1894, when the Society’s membership had significantly increased nationwide owing to the success of Fabian Essays. One piece, “The Fabian Society: What It Has Done; and How It Has Done It” (1892), Shaw had prepared as a lecture for the benefit of these newer members to be delivered at the Society’s very first annual conference. Curiously (possibly because of its topicality), Miller not only omits but fails to mention the most significant essay belonging to this group, “To Your Tents, Oh Israel” (1893), written in consultation with Sidney Webb. In savagely attacking Gladstone’s year-old Liberal Party government, the essay caused outrage among Radical Liberals, who felt especially betrayed as the Fabians had spent the previous six years assiduously permeating the radical wing of the Liberal Party. Shaw spent more time on this work, originally published in the Fortnightly Review (November 1893), than on practically any other of his political writings apart from the political books and Common Sense. The Fabians had planned from the beginning that after publication Shaw would adapt the Fortnightly essay as a Fabian Tract, expanding its arguments as well as responding to the objections raised in other leading London periodicals associated with the Liberal Party such as the Contemporary Review. This revision achieved wide circulation as Fabian Tract No. 49, A Plan of Campaign for Labor (1894), which, in laying laid down the blueprint for the formation of a trade-union-backed parliamentary political party to represent the interests of working people, would become one of the most successfully influential of all Shaw’s writings. When the Labour Party came into existence fourteen years later, it was exactly along the lines the essay had first proposed. Happily, the original Fortnightly Review essay has been reprinted recently in Shaw 41.2, where the interested reader can pick up its story. An incidental but significant by-product of the essay was Shaw meeting Frank Harris, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, who soon afterward employed him as drama critic for the Saturday Review.A significant subgroup of pieces reprinted here comes from a series of brilliant essays Shaw wrote in the 1890s on both political and cultural subjects bookended by his treatises on Ibsen and Wagner—one of his most underrated literary achievements. Three are included largely intact in this collection (“The Impossibilities of Anarchism” [1893], “The Illusions of Socialism” [1896], and “Socialism for Millionaires” [1896]). With Shaw writing at the height of his highly developed ratiocinative powers, his approach to questions of epistemology in an essay like “The Illusions of Socialism,” for instance, is quite unlike that of anyone else. Once he began publishing his own plays, he developed this type of essay writing into the practically sui generis literary form known as the Shavian preface.Next up (in this volume) are selections from Fabianism and the Empire (1900), which Miller for some peculiar reason calls “distressing for [Shaw’s] present-day readers,” although she usefully notes that “Shaw was more careful than usual to identify himself as ‘editor’ rather than author; though he did write the manifesto, he endeavored in it to express Fabian opinions and not necessarily his own.” In fact, this was yet another highly controversial work the Fabians directed at the Liberals, almost all of whom sided with the white colonial Boer settlers in the South African wars, whereas the Fabians believed that, on balance, it would be more favorable for the development of socialism if the British, despite their questionable motives, prevailed in their imperial war. Together with its sister essay (not included) Fabianism and the Fiscal Question (1904), about tariffs and international trade, Shaw’s main argument was principally directed against cheap labor (of great relevance again at a time of trade wars with China). We might also note that Shaw’s third sole-authored political book, The Commonsense of Municipal Trading (1904), also ignored in this volume, has again become relevant in an age of zero-hour contracts after the reprivatization of municipal businesses has led back to the problematic social consequences of cheap labor, especially poverty and inequality, so familiar to Shaw. At its most basic Shaw’s politics sought to eradicate poverty, an inevitable consequence of cheap labor, for which the only solution is incrementally increasing economic equality.At the height of his fame, Shaw stepped down in 1911 from his leadership role in the Fabian Society while remaining its most in-demand speaker and most public figurehead. At the same time he intensified his questioning (begun after writing Major Barbara in 1905) around the political and economic issues of equality and the related social issue of what he termed intermarriageability (marriage between classes as a test of social equality—one of his most significant political concepts, unmentioned by Miller), which provided the foundation of his political writing for the rest of his very long life. These issues are explored in this reviewer’s Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914, the only substantial contribution to the subject published in the past ten years or so, although not cited by Miller (she mentions a later book from the same Palgrave series). Thus when she writes, symptomatically you might say, in her introduction that “Shaw’s political writings from 1900 to 1920 were concerned with great issues of the day such as the Boer War, the First World War, and the Irish rebellion,” a curious gap, not to say a yawning gulf, opens up in this collection, in completely bypassing one of the most important periods of Shaw’s career in terms of his political thinking, when questions about economic equality became paramount. This applied also to his plays. Where it became something of a received idea in the critical literature that a relaxation in tension, perhaps even a loss of focus, seeped into his dramatic writing between the two unquestioned masterpieces Major Barbara (1905) and Heartbreak House (1916), Shaw’s plays should instead be seen as another medium for his intense explorations of the political implications of economic equality. Thus, to take two of his most popular comedies, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1907) questions whether one human life is worth more than another, while Pygmalion (1912) asks what is the difference between a flower girl and a duchess when they speak with the same accent. Omitting this keystone of economic equality from Shaw’s political thinking makes it practically impossible to comprehend any coherence in Shaw’s later political writing, including 1928’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, which Miller herself states was rooted in his earlier political writing, although she fails to ascribe it to this crucial pre-1914 period. The published version of Shaw’s 1913 major lecture to the National Liberal Club, “On Equality,” which encapsulates most concisely these ideas, would have been the obvious candidate to fill the chasm at the heart of this volume, while his most comprehensive presentation of economic and political arguments about equality, which came right at the end of this period in the 1914 series of six Fabian Lectures “On Redistribution,” has been reprinted in SHAW 36.1. Shaw, in fact, prepared those lectures during the first months of the Great War at exactly the same time as he was writing his best-known political essay, Common Sense about the War (1914), which has been excerpted here. The piece was originally published as a thirty-two-page supplement to the New Statesman, but scholars for some unfathomable reason have consistently insisted on making it longer than it was, and Miller repeats that mistake by adding fifty-two nonexistent pages to its length. Another substantial wartime political essay (though not about the war itself), “How to Settle the Irish Question” (1917), is also included as Shaw’s most significant contribution to the political literature on his native Ireland outside the various prefaces (1907, 1912) and afterwords (1928) to John Bull’s Other Island.Miller’s introduction itself is well written, almost always clear and readable, an indispensable quality for a volume like this. An exception to this clarity, however, is telling, as it invariably occurs whenever she touches on Shaw’s controversial later political pieces. At these points, scholarly objectivity, analysis, and careful judgment is dropped in favor of mostly unsupported adjectival invective such as, to give a few examples, “indefensible political positions”; “reckless failure of judgement that unfortunately afflicts much of his political writing after 1930”; “appalling sentiments that would be voiced in his later writings”; “a noxious tolerance for fascist dictators”; “ill-judged propensity for praising fascists.” She may have felt it better, or at least simpler, to offer a hostage to fortune in relation to Shaw’s provocative polemics during the 1920s and 1930s rather than provide the more dispassionate, but much-needed critical analysis that is sorely needed in respect of these works. In contrast, she becomes genuinely enlightening on those subjects where she provides fresh thinking, particularly in relation to Shaw choosing in The Guide to address his reader as a woman, and in her related defense of Shaw from the very contemporary accusation of “mansplaining.” Beyond giving a hostage to fortune in relation to the later political writing and an apparent unfamiliarity with the literature in respect of the middle period, her castigation of Shaw for not being sensitive to racial and environmental issues (“Two of the major political fault-lines of today, race and the environment, are virtually ignored across Shaw’s work”) raises even more problems.Questions about Shaw’s attitudes to such topics is certainly appropriate, and some of Shaw’s statements on these matters are worth serious probing, but Miller proceeds, without any investigation or analysis, to proffer questionable answers at best. Shaw, in fact, was a powerful advocate far in advance of his own time for wind and wave energy use (only now starting to be implemented as urgency has crept into our need for environmental reforms), and similar concerns may be seen to lay behind his personal clothing and eating choices, not to mention his quixotic desire to reform the English alphabet. As for questions of race, Shaw constantly pointed out that the British Empire was mostly nonwhite, necessitating equal treatment for its citizens in terms of governance. In addition, he repeatedly raised the question of race in his later plays, as well as in his contemporaneous fable, The Black Girl in Her Search for God. She says of Fabianism and the Empire that Shaw “dismisses out of hand the idea of representative governance for native populations,” which is certainly disquieting at first sight. And then she quotes Shaw: “As for parliamentary institutions for native races, that dream has been disposed of by the American experiments after the Civil War.” Without contextualization, that quote smacks of direct racism, but in fact it opens up one of the big questions of international governance that Shaw, more than most, devoted a great deal of thought to after World War I, another major area of his political thinking bypassed in this volume. It can be seen most clearly in an ongoing post–World War I dispute with his friend and fellow political thinker H. G. Wells, who directly called out Shaw’s attitudes as racist in such matters. Wells leaned much more toward a notion of abstract universal human rights than did Shaw, and his line of thinking as set out in his The Rights of Man (1940) was instrumental in what later became the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Shaw, in contrast, veered away from such abstractions, believing that before we can reach any such ideal state cultural (not racial) homogeneity is far more important in practice in determining international groupings. Shaw’s view, whether we like it or not, is in fact what we see in international relations, with Western hegemony in most of the world, Chinese aspirations to hegemony in Asia, the Muslim and Sub-Sahara African worlds in their own geographical spheres, and so on, rather than the ideal world that the United Nations—and indeed all of us—may hold as a long-term goal. Ultimately the two viewpoints are not in conflict.Without such a close examination of Shaw’s thinking on these not at all simple questions, Miller’s conclusion in relation to Fabianism and the Empire is unfortunate: “Given Shaw’s far-reaching and anti-conventional imagination, it is disquieting nonetheless to see how little consideration [the indigenous and nonwhite populations] receive here. . . . Racial capitalism was a feature of imperial capitalism that Shaw does not seem to have grasped.” Along with the other gaps in this volume already noted, such a statement fails to take into account Shaw’s reaction, not long after the writing of Fabianism and the Empire, to the 1906 Denshawai incident in Egypt (again from the crucial ten-year period leading up to the Great War). This event and how it was handled by British colonial authorities colored practically all his later political thinking, especially in relation to racial and cultural prejudice. That Miller does not refer to it is not surprising as it has gone largely unremarked in both Shaw and postcolonial studies, but it is nevertheless disappointing to see in a newly published work. The English Beatrice Webb was one such highly intelligent contemporary incapable of understanding why the Irish Shaw had been so outraged by the British treatment of Egyptian villagers who had disturbed a pigeon-shooting party of British Army officers, which resulted in public hangings, penal servitude, and long prison sentences for the poor villagers who depended on the pigeons for their livelihood. To Shaw, even as the author of Fabianism and the Empire, the episode became emblematic of the moral bankruptcy of the whole colonial enterprise. Notably he would never forgive Edward Grey, the then new Liberal British foreign secretary, who refused to condemn in Parliament the British treatment of the Egyptian villagers, this the same Grey who later became his chief rhetorical target in Common Sense for blithely leading Britain into World War I. So important was the Denshawai incident to Shaw that he delayed publication of his plays John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara for a year so that he could add a lengthy section to the preface of the former about the implications of Denshawai for imperialism in a work otherwise devoted to England’s colonial relation to Ireland. That section might have been usefully included in this volume and prevented confusions about Shaw’s attitudes to race and the empire.A bit less grievously, the editor blames Shaw for not being a successful prophet, although, contradictorily, she also claims that attribute as one of his virtues. “What is certain is that the essay [“How to Settle the Irish Question”] shows Shaw to have little aptitude for reading the tea leaves on questions related to Ireland,” she writes. And Miller is right to say that Shaw did not foresee partition in Ireland, but Shaw himself pointed this out because it was unthinkable for both Irish nationalists and unionists. Generally, he was happy to acknowledge such failures if and when he became aware of them. To say as she does that Shaw underestimated Sinn Féin may have been true before 1916, but does not accord, for instance, with a Shaw letter written to the Manchester Guardian shortly before the war ended in 1918 pleading with the British Administration to appoint an Irish Executive Administration for Ireland to forestall otherwise inevitable violence. Unhappily, the Irish (and British) have been living with the (sometimes bloody) consequences to this day. In many, many ways Shaw was among the more prescient writers on politics of his time, which, after all, is why this mostly valuable volume is being published now. Curiously enough, after both Ireland and the United Kingdom joined the European Union (as it was later termed) in 1973, a de facto federation similar to what Shaw proposed, but within a larger European federation, came increasingly into prospect, particularly when reinforced by the Good Friday Agreement in 1988, designed to mitigate the effects of partition. England has recently put a spanner in the works by forcing (against the wishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland) the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Yet any lasting constitutional solution working itself out without eventually returning to some form of Shaw’s proposal seems improbable. The point of political prophesies is not whether they are fulfilled but whether they move things in the right direction. Shaw in his “major political writings” included in this volume almost always proposes fresh ways of approaching apparently insoluble and contentious political problems. That alone makes this new volume worthwhile.
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Dec 14, 2023
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