Readers, audiences, and scholars of Shaw haven't always been sure how seriously to take the Superman. G. K. Chesterton, who once referred to Shaw's experimentalist Life Force as a “baby god,” composed a sly takedown of Shavian theology in the Daily News in 1909 called “How I Found the Superman.” Posing as an investigative journalist, Chesterton says he has located the Superman in Croydon, the result of a breeding experiment between aristocratic do-gooder Lady Hypatia Hagg and her geologist husband Dr. Hagg, whose background in practical science has, for no good reason, led him to pronounce on “Neo-Individualist Eugenics.” Chesterton's squib is that these awful parents claim to have produced the next evolution in human development, a creature so weak and hideous that he can't leave his bedroom. Bursting through the door, Chesterton accidentally kills the Superman by letting in a draught. The crestfallen parents believe they hear the “wail of the universe” in the howling wind, but Chesterton perceives, instead, a divine “hoot of laughter.”1It will be impossible to laugh at the Superman after reading Matthew Yde's Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. Yde assembles a fierce indictment of Shaw's fascist and proto-fascist rage for order—over individual bodies, social formations, and human progress—that permeates the plays and prose from The Quintessence of Ibsenism through the later, more ruthless allegories of the “liquidation” of the unproductive, such as The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) and The Millionairess (1936). Yde's central proposition, elegant in its directness and devastating in its resonances, is that the sheer ubiquity and recurrence of Shaw's calls for the deaths of the evolutionarily disfavored prove that Shaw was not simply a jester who deployed Swiftian hyperbole for humanitarian ends. Yde implores us to take Shaw seriously when we would most like to excuse him: “Perhaps when we accept the absolutely radical nature of the program for social change that Shaw advocated, and how it coalesced with so much of what was actually happening in the 1930s and 1940s … we can begin to reevaluate his powerful plays” (110).Yde situates Shaw within a tradition of utopian literature stretching back to Plato's Republic. Shaw's Platonism and Socratic irony have featured in recent studies, such as Martin Puchner's The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (2010) and Sidney Albert's Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in Major Barbara (2012). Yde shifts what has largely been a discussion of Platonic dramaturgy in Shaw's plays to Shaw's appropriation of Plato's model of a perfectly ordered city, ruled by a philosopher-king and bolstered by state-sponsored art and myths. Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, two of the fiercest twentieth-century critics of Plato's “closed” society, figure prominently in Yde's argument. But while classical utopian literature presumes a static state of affairs, Yde demonstrates that Shaw was part of a post-Darwinian utopian avant-garde that is dynamic and evolutionary, an allegedly progressive alternative to runaway capitalism, the inefficiency of democracy, and the pluralism of mass society. In his dynamic utopianism, Shaw might be placed alongside H. G. Wells and, far more troublingly, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler.Yde's sweeping survey of Shaw's career manages to touch on nearly every play and major treatise Shaw wrote while maintaining a careful attention to details. In a couple of preliminary chapters, Yde identifies latent traces of totalitarianism in Shaw's early tracts on Ibsen and Wagner. Perhaps most provocatively, he names Wagner's Siegfried in Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) as the template for later Shavian world-betterers and advocates of the Superman, such as Andrew Undershaft and Epifania Ognissanti di Parerga. Shaw's dismissal of love as a source of redemption in Wagner's music dramas in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) set him on a destructive course that led him to lionize dictators as scions of order after the chaotic destruction of World War I. Siegfried, divorced from tradition and allegedly attuned to the dictates of a beneficent evolutionary appetite, strikes Yde as “hardly … an evolutionary advancement. He is possessed chiefly of a vigorous brutality, a need to exercise his prodigious strength in acts of violence; he lacks any intellectual or moral development, and is purely a spontaneous creature of the woods” (52). Shaw's choice of a fearless brute as a hero may have been as calamitous as any of the myriad antagonists he would name during his career: the professional managerial class, inefficient rulers, recidivist criminals, and the poor.Chapters 3 and 4 contain the most persuasive, carefully constructed, and shattering discussions in the book. Yde first reads Man and Superman (1902), John Bull's Other Island (1904), and Major Barbara (1905), a trilogy of great plays that kicked off the “second phase” of Shaw's playwriting career, as an attempt to formulate Creative Evolution as a civic religion and to demonstrate how socialism might provide the totalitarian politics that would support this doctrine. While John Tanner is, for Yde, a bit of a buffoon in Man and Superman, the Tanner who authors The Revolutionist's Handbook that Shaw appended to the published play proposes creeds that would become fixtures in Shaw's nascent totalitarianism. Chief among these is the need for “creative destruction” to raze and rebuild a compromised world and a negative eugenics that would weed out the self-disciplined from the hedonistic and unproductive.In John Bull's Other Island, Shaw attempts to make Tanner socially effective by dividing him in three—“the mystic, the self-creating man of hard unsentimental intellect, and the man of action” (87). But Shaw is unable to reconcile Broadbent, his Siegfried epigone, with the representatives of spirit (Keegan) and thought (Doyle) that should guide his energy and efficiency. Major Barbara completes the circuit by imagining the model city of Perivale St. Andrews as a concentration of order and cleanliness that seduces the ambassadors of spirit (Barbara) and intellect (Cusins) into a pact with administrative efficacy (Undershaft). For Yde, the will to power through weaponry does, in fact, win out in the play's notoriously enigmatic final debate: Undershaft's creed of righteous violence, amorally wielded in service of weeding out bad elements from a coming utopia, “is so emphatic that it overshadows the virtues of cleanliness and order, the eradication of poverty, the ostensible theme of the play” (103).Chapter 4 is the most lucid reading of Back to Methuselah I have ever encountered, largely because Yde sets in relief the unreconciled contradictions in Shaw's five-play cycle: between despair and optimism; between the despotic control over the fate of Short-Livers and the self-regulating anarchism of Long-Livers; and between Shaw's rejection of neo-Darwinian rationalizations in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and his acceptance of neo-Darwinian rationalizations “to assist the supposed fittest members of the race and to ensure the speedy elimination of the less fit” (129). What Yde uncovers as more consistent concerns in Shaw's Pentateuch are a profound and disconcerting hatred for the body and its ungovernable desires, a deep-rooted ambivalence about the function of art, and a general “revolt against the most basic facts of existence” (140). Similar visions of mastery characterized germinal totalitarian regimes in the 1920s.In Chapters 5 and 6, Yde turns to Shaw's plays that were written in response to actualized totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. He insists quite reasonably, for instance, that Shaw's “Oriental Fable” The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles needs to be read as a very thinly veiled allegory of the “Great Purge,” a wave of killings undertaken by Soviet Bolsheviks against alleged dissidents that began as Shaw was completing his play and authoring his preface. As clamorously pro-totalitarian as the Simpleton may be, Yde sensitively imagines how it might be staged to explore, rather than simply to promote, the material consequences of mass liquidation. For example, when the four semidivine children of a failed eugenics experiment in the play “disappear” on a Judgment Day that erases unproductive people, Yde argues that Shaw is toying with his audience's ability to see these characters simply as symbols of wastefulness and to assent to their extraction. Wittingly or not, Shaw's play about extermination figures the cost of excising specific lives in the name of purifying and advancing the species. The final chapter, which centers on Shaw's late play Farfetched Fables (1950), focuses on Shaw's obdurate dedication to negative eugenics even after evidence of the Nazi camps had surfaced. Yde finds Shaw, at the end of his life, desperately clinging to Creative Evolution, to utopianism, and to Stalin and the Soviet Union as ideals despite the facts. “The masses may need to be fed lies,” Yde concludes, “but it appears that so did Bernard Shaw” (193).Longing for Utopia is a harrowing and also a necessary contribution to the present and future of Shaw scholarship. It will cause arguments and painful reckonings, and I would wager that it is the most significant single-author study of Shaw written in the past decade. In his essay “GBS and the Despots,” Stanley Weintraub proposes that Shaw's later plays and his promotion of Stalinist communism “arose from impatience with between-the-wars malaise, when governments that had failed to prevent the First World War were in disorderly regression towards a second war.”2 Yde expands Weintraub's thesis by tracing the roots of Shaw's totalitarian sympathies from his earliest publications and, more schematically, his chaotic adolescence. By this account, Shaw's self-fashioning, the invention of GBS out of the sublimated disappointments of George Bernard Shaw, may have created both a genius and, in many respects, a monster.Yde's study is a deliberate rejoinder to Arnold Silver's Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side (1982), which detected a strain of sadism in Shaw's life and art. But I think it can be read most profitably with and against Gareth Griffith's Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw (1992). For Griffith, Shaw's political philosophy, as thorny, counterfactual, and disgusting as it can be, is a series of tussles between perfection and happiness, with perfection (or utopianism, if you like) winning out when Shaw's impatience and despair led him to seek out strategies to “transcend” politics. But Griffith also reminds us that Shaw could be sympathetic to the everyday wrangling of the world as it is. Indeed, the “rent of ability” that Shaw discusses in the 1910 pamphlet that gives Griffith his title is a surprisingly temperate explanation of why we place special value on the work of “extraordinary” men in ordinary situations and “ordinary” men in extraordinary situations, for example, a man of middling political abilities who becomes a king or a general. Shaw's binary views and his elitism are unquestionable. As John Carey demonstrates in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1993), and as Yde acknowledges in his epilogue, Shaw was hardly alone among his fellow modernists in his extraordinary antipathy to mass mediocrity and anomie. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that Yde's book is a totalitarian reading of totalitarian impulses, occasionally leaving out mitigating details and expelling undesirable elements to forge its case. Does The Apple Cart (1928), written around the beginning of Shaw's most notorious embrace of fascism, fit into this argument? It is about a king who triumphs over the inefficiency of a parliamentary democracy not because of special evolutionary gifts but because of situational competence—that is, he knows about ruling because he has ruled. And how about Shaw's five-minute 1928 newsreel, “First Appearance in America” (albeit filmed at Ayot St. Lawrence), where he mocks Mussolini precisely for his facial inelasticity, his failure to evolve to suit the conditions of new media? These examples do not diminish Yde's invaluable work, but they do leave me puzzled about how critically Shaw thought about his own utopian remedies.This is a puzzle that occasionally troubles Yde. In the midst of his discussion of Man and Superman, for instance, Yde introduces the qualification “there is a long way to go from a literary artist using the metaphor of creative destruction in his work to a dictator using it as a principle of his regeneration movement” (82). I agree entirely, and, though this is not a thread that Yde pursues, it is a topic that we Shavians need to talk about in our evaluations of Shaw: to what extent is a use and abuse of language continuous with the deeds described by and perhaps seeded by that language? Yde sometimes elides metaphor and act by equating Shaw's views with the Nazis, a strategy that teeters on the edge of challenging and sensationalistic. Take this passage, for example, from his discussion of The Perfect Wagnerite: “Shaw's position leads logically to the efficient extermination of the unfit or recalcitrant, which of course the Nazis and the Soviet Politburo put into rationally ordered practice with their trains and gas chambers, show trials, purges, and labor camps, and which regimes Shaw would later expend a great deal of energy defending” (52). This is close to what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum, a fallacy that establishes guilt by resemblance and that disables evaluation through comparison with the gold standard of wickedness. How valid is this comparison? Is the gap between speech and action, so agonizingly worried by Shaw's characters who can speak but not do, paradoxically Shaw's salvation? This is another question that Shaw scholars need to address, with the urgency that Yde demands.Equally compelling, I think, are analyses that demonstrate how Shaw's plays are most poignant when they counterpoise ambivalence in feeling with stridency of tone. In John Bull's Other Island, for instance, Yde reads Larry Doyle, the civil engineer, as a potential totalitarian, “a creator of organized material reality” (92), who cannot, like Shaw, disguise his contempt for his Irish homeland, though “actually his contempt only manifests intermittently, his feelings really being ambivalent” (92). Do we watch Shaw's plays and read his prose because they enact a similar ambivalence about reshaping the world? Or are we attracted to Shaw's dreams of power and rhetorical confidence without properly thinking through the consequences of his schemes for social betterment? In other words, Yde's book is valuable as a reservoir of questions as much as a battery of answers.When I turned the final page of Longing for Utopia, I had to take a long bath, drink some gin, and wonder why I still enjoy watching Shaw's plays and reading his prose. Yde's book does not provide much consolation on that front, except through the example of its intellectual bravery in confronting Shaw's darkest ideas. Yde is morally incisive, guided by a powerful sense of justice: I am not simply a better critic of Shaw for reading his book but also perhaps a better person. This is a groundbreaking study that mobilizes rigorous archival research in service of high-stakes argumentation. Yde has laid the foundation for a new phase in Shaw scholarship: a fresh, determined engagement with the artist, polemicist, and, yes, would-be totalitarian we thought we knew.