Who, after all,
has read H.G. Wells’s Anticipations of
1902, which in its last pages calls on a socialist utopia to destroy the ‘grey
confusion’ of democracy through a world state governed by a self-appointed
white elite that would purify mankind by exterminating the dark races? Wells’s
aim was efficiency, in a tradition of socialist genocide and white-supremacy
doctrines spanning two centuries; as Michael Coren implied in The Invisible Man in 1903, he was part
of a long tradition. ‘The world is a world, not a charitable institution’,
Wells wrote grimly in his concluding pages, demanding genocide. When Hitler
called his movement National Socialism the title was widely condemned by German
socialist parties as a deceitful manoeuvre secretly inspired by high finance,
but its racial policies, for good reason, were not seen as unsocialist. The
real objection to communist ideas, Hitler once told a confidant, is that
‘basically they are not socialist’, since they create mere herds without
individual life.
Even sex, it is
surprising to report, seldom succeeds in animating the writings of the
socialists. Charles Fourier, of whose style Flaubert complained, died as early
as 1837, and he was best known for inventing the phalanstery – a rular
community ideally of 1,620 people – where life, labour and its rewards were to
be governed by elaborate rules. At his death he left a manuscript called Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux, composed in
1817-18, a utopia in the pre-Marxian vein composed at a time when other
radicals like Shelley were interesting themselves in love. Fourier sought to
harmonise the passions and instincts of mankind by releasing them from
repression, which he saw as the source of such perversities as sadism and
homosexuality, and by linking sexual urges to the movements of the heavenly
bodies. Unknown to Flaubert, the book lay unpublished as a whole in five
notebooks until 1967, a time that might be thought propitious to a theory of
sexual freedom and social revolutions, but in the event it went largely
unnoticed. Even free love, it seems, does not survive long stretches of
socialist prose.
Raymond Williams
would freely admit that he belonged to a generation that read very little Marx,
implying perhaps that he thought other generations read a lot of him, and in a
radio interview Eric Hobsbawm has recently told how, as a schoolboy in
pre-Hitler Berlin, he became a Marxist without reading a word of him, an only
began reading him at all because his schoolmaster told him he did not know what
he was talking about. In Starting Out in
the Thirties (1966), similarly, Alfred Kazin has revealed of his teenage
self that socialism in those early years was ‘a way of life’, since ‘everyone
else I knew in New York was a socialist, more or less’. No other view was
heard. Socialism was not a gesture of revolt but an unthinking act of
conformity, and reading had nothing to do with it. It is always rash to assume
that intellectuals admire only authors they know.
In 1748, exactly a
century before the Communist Manifesto of
Marx and Engels, Montesquieu’s Esprit des
Lois appeared, a comparative study of human society that drew excited
attention to how social institutions differ according to period, custom and
climate. Montesquieu sought to reform the French monarchical system. He was
neither a revolutionary nor a moral relativist, though that did not save his
book from the papal index; in fact his first chapter insisted the laws of life
are given. God, he argues,
acts according to the laws of the universe because He
knows them; knows them because He made them, made them because they concern
wisdom and power,
every human and
physical variation representing an ultimate uniformity he insists, every change
an ultimate consistency in human nature.
If it is asked why
Americans, on the whole, tended to avoid the term ‘revolution’ before 1800, the
most probable explanation may also be the most surprising. Since the word was
still mainly preservative in its implications, it may have been natural to them
to avoid it on that ground alone. Preservers at heart such men as Washington,
Madison and Jefferson may have been; but in the Declaration of 1776 they
offered themselves as heralds of a new age – novus ordo seclorum – not as the
revivers of an old. Radical rhetoricians of the age, like Paine, may have found
revolution still too backward-looking a term to their taste. That may explain
why 1776, unlike 1689, had to wait for decades before it chose to call itself
unequivocally by that name.
I want to ask here
how it is that, in defiance of the evidence, the name of socialism still sounds
benevolent, and how its openly Tory and reactionary traditions have been so
thoroughly forgotten: a paradox all the more remarkable in an age familiar with
parties called socialist that openly govern in a conservative way.
The Tory tradition
of socialism was once plain in its motives and lucid in its arguments. In the
world’s first industrial zone, which was western Europe, a new commerce of
factories, railways and mines had ruthlessly transformed an ancient landscape
at dizzying speed, and capitalism (as some were coming to call it) was
naturally seen as radical. Parties called liberal that advocated free trade and
the free market were rapidly destroying traditional patterns of life, loosening
family ties and threatening morally itself. No wonder if Ruskin and Morris,
like the Christian Socialists before them, detested the liberal idea of the
division of labour which, as they believed, signified a soul-destroying shift
from the benevolent village community to the soulless factory bench. Socialism
above all meant a horror of the new age: an age of machines and high finance.
It was more than conservative. It was reactionary and nostalgic, and in the
long march from status to contract it demanded a return to the familiar and
time-honoured world of status.
‘The only thing
that stops God from sending a second flood is that the first was useless’ (Chamfort).
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