An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions
I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every
clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful
classification than any now current. But, of course, nearly every
individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to
wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and
the other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. And
particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that
for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication
whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a
non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen
different schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall
towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements in
England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and
imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
the same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of
Syndicalism a concrete definition as the "Guild Socialism" of Mr. Orage.
All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a
novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally
better, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance
thither, however much they differ as to the form that order should
assume.
For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the
world, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of
analysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing.
The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never at
any time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself that
was at once simple, complete and acceptable to any large proportion of
those who call themselves socialists. But always it has pointed to two
or three definite things. The first of these is that unlimited freedoms
of private property, with increasing facilities of exchange,
combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous to
human liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private wages
slavery of larger and larger proportions of the population. Every school
of socialism states this in some more or less complete form, however
divergent the remedial methods suggested by the different schools. And,
next, every school of socialism accepts the concentration of management
and property as necessary, and declines to contemplate what is the
typical Conservator remedy, its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets up
not only against the large private owner, but against owners generally,
the idea of a public proprietor, the State, which shall hold in the
collective interest. But where the earlier socialisms stopped short, and
where to this day socialism is vague, divided, and unprepared, is upon
the psychological problems involved in that new and largely
unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the still more subtle
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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