Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G. Wells, and: H. G. Wells: Traversing Time (review)

John S. Partington wants to assert H. G. Wells's prominent, if not leading, role as proponent of a scheme for world government. In the process, he provides an extensive assessment of the author's various versions of this scheme, with reference chiefly to Wells's own writings, though in the last chapter of Partington's book Wells's ideas are compared to those of other global planners, including Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europa plan, the Federal Union associated with Clarence K. Streit, and David Mitrany's Functional World Government. Wells progressively refined his notion of world government from its early appearance in Anticipations (1902) until it ultimately required equality of all peoples and the subordination of nation states, as well as overall supervision of transport, weaponry, and natural resources. Partington's first chapter indicates Wells's debts to international socialism and to Thomas Henry Huxley's ethical evolution. Intent on showing the gradual working out of Wells's scheme for a world government, Partington does not view Wells with any critical doubt. He allows in passing that Wells built his career on scientific romances that warned of the dangerous misuse of science, but he does not acknowledge the constant fluctuation in Wells's thought, especially evident in the fiction, between a despairing sense that humanity will never shed its beastly inheritance, and an almost religious conviction that humankind is destined for a noble future.

One great weakness in Wells's scheme for world government was, in fact, his discounting of the religious impulse. Much of his thought was premised on humankind's capacity to follow reason. But phenomena such as the rapid spread of Islam over the Malay archipelago in medieval times and the persistence of fervent religious belief in the supposedly secular modern societies of the west should have cautioned him about the human tendency to crave a power beyond itself. Wells himself had a brief tryst with the religious impulse during the First World War. If a kind of religious hope could touch even this most rational of men, what of those who never aspired to a life based on logic? Partington's book, then, is a useful, but narrow and often repetitive study of a single, if important, aspect of Wells's thinking.

By contrast, W. Warren Wagar's H. G. Wells: Traversing Time, is a gracefully written book that draws on the author's lifelong interest in Wells. This book might not be revelatory for scholars already familiar with Wells, but it is a splendid introduction for those not versed in Wellsian matters. In his own writing, Wells's ideas often seem confused and contradictory; here, Wagar makes ample use of both Wells's fiction and his prose to present the author's ideas in a manner that is lucid and easy to follow. This is a book of intellectual history, not literary criticism, and so its focus is on Wells's developing philosophy, not his accomplishments as a stylist. Nonetheless, Wagar's examination of the fiction, from the scientific romances to the late studies of character, illuminates Wells's creative method even as it stresses the nature of his thinking. In a chapter entitled "Before and Beyond Modernism," for example, Wagar sides with those critics who relate Wells not to the Edwardian social realists, but to postmodern fiction because of his willingness to meddle with the conventional relationships between author and reader.

But Wagar's main focus is still Wells's philosophy. Traversing Time makes clear that, for his entire adult life, Wells entertained two competing worldviews; behind both lay T. H. Huxley and Darwinism. In the first view, humankind is doomed to extinction through its inability to adapt to a rapidly changing world, one which is in fact largely altered by...