Shaw's Controversial Socialism (review)

In 1917, George Bernard Shaw wrote a short variety sketch entitled Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress, in which he got the Russian Revolution spectacularly wrong. This sketch, despite its subject matter, does not feature in James Alexander's Shaw's Controversial Socialism; perhaps, because it occupies as insignificant a place in Shaw's oeuvre as Vera, or the Nihilists does in Oscar Wilde's; perhaps, because it postdates Alexander's chosen time-frame of 1882–1904; but most likely, because consideration is ruled out by the stringency of Alexander's adherence to his thesis that there is an "absolute incommensurability between the plays and the politics" (219). Alexander's concern is solely with the latter: although Shaw's "interest in politics was at least in part … dramatic" (68), "it was in politics, rather than in the drama, that he transcended his individuality" (5). The characters in the plays were nothing more than aspects of Shaw, but, in politics, Shaw was himself "an actor, a character, playing a part" (6). Socialism was "about activity," the "plays were about talk" (130), and Alexander dismisses any comparison between the two on the basis of their insurmountable "difference in form" (219).

It is a distinction the reader has to accept on faith in order to judge the book on its own terms. Despite the occasional aside on the plays' "historical sensibility" (41) or a brief elucidation of the contemporary prototypes of various characters and scenes (69, 131), the discussion remains squarely in the realm of politics. Much as one may wish for more details about "The Revolutionist's Handbook" or John Bull's Other Island, in lieu of yet another example of Shaw's understanding of marginal utility, they are confined to a few pages in the body of the text (see 175–80) and to the conclusion, which presents, almost as an afterthought, the only sustained examination of the relation between the plays and the politics. But the tantalizing remarks on Shaw's prefaces or on Man and Superman are the stuff of literary criticism, and to sigh for more in this vein is to ask for a very different book. Alexander's aims and interests are not those of literary or dramatic critics, and if the study has any flaws, they are to be found in his falling short of his own goal, not in his failing to accomplish what he never set out to do.

The book has a clear narrative trajectory, tracing Shaw's changing views of politics and economics, in England and on the Continent. The first chapter deals with Marxist, Fabian, Ricardian, and Jevonian economic theories of the 1880s; the second addresses the Fabian policy of permeating the Liberal party in the 1880s and 1890s and reaction to the rise of Labour and socialist unification; the third turns to the Second International and European socialism in the 1890s and 1900s; and the fourth moves wholly into the Edwardian period, focusing on new liberalism and Fabian attitudes to imperialism, protectionism, and free trade. The final, one cannot help feeling somewhat aborted, chapter explores Shaw's idea of the equality of incomes, his notorious accommodation of twentieth-century dictatorships, and his paradoxical support for both reform and revolution. What holds all these chapters together is the argument that Shaw's socialism was originally constructed in opposition to both Marxism and liberalism, as a "negation" of existing alternatives, but that approach was reversed after 1905 so as to assimilate or incorporate both (165). Alexander's range of reference is impressive: most of the politically significant individuals of the three decades, from William Gladstone, J.A. Hobson, and L.T. Hobhouse to Henry George, H.M. Hyndman, and William Morris and from Friedrich Engels, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky to Joseph Chamberlain, John Morley, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, make an appearance. Hitherto obscure articles and lectures are analysed on a par with famous works like the Fabian Essays in Socialism, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, and Fabianism and the Empire...