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Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw
Provides a comprehensive and critical account of Shaws political ideas. Central reading for anyone seeking to understand his political and literary writings.
- GenresPolitics
317 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 3, 1992
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July 26, 2022
Book: Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw
Author: Gareth Griffith
Publisher: Routledge; 1st edition (23 March 1995)
Language: English
Paperback: 320 pages
Item Weight: 454 g
Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.85 x 23.39 cm
Price: 5425/-
Was he a Socialist?
For Shaw, politics and religion were thoroughly intertwined in that the world had to be arranged in ways that aided the Life Force in its work; thus, a secular game plan was obligatory to complement his cosmology.
While he chooses the word ‘political’ as a subtitle for just four of them, every one of his plays is not only stoutly engaged with specific issues of his time but wholly invested in exploring the question of how to organize ourselves most equitably and most productively. Even before the outbreak of world war, the Victorian answer to that question seemed perilously close to unravelling.
And yet where the British labour movement was concerned, therefore, he was perhaps the most influential of all socialist propagandists.
Together with his fellow polymath, H.G.Wells, he mapped out the contours of the progressive cause in Britain and beyond. Shaw was like a machine, producing ideas and opinions at a constant rate over seventy years, stretching and pulling the mindof his audience, tugging at its conscience, trying its nerve and tweaking its prejudices.
He was one of the master intellectuals of his age, a prince in the universe of progressive thought.
So what are we to make of him?
Importing into Marx his own abstract bourgeois morality and then condemning Marx for moral romanticism, Shaw was unable to develop his natural bent for dialectics into truly scientific dialectics.
He has remained the living contradiction; and for this reason his readers and audiences have been so often at a loss whether or not to take him seriously.
The compassion of capitalism stirs him to fuming abhorrence; yet no cleverer resistance of capitalism has ever been made than Shaw’s picture of the Nietzschean capitalist following his normal intuitions with the incorruptibility of an animal.
Shaw has the reputation of a morally upright rationalist, whose head rules his heart; yet he has felt more deeply and overwhelmingly than he has thought, and the instincts and sentiments which his bourgeois egoism has suppressed have partially found release in bourgeois theology and over-romanticizing.
For years he worked with indefatigable commitment for the cause of socialism, and in his polemics both by spoken and the written word routed its enemies with unparalleled dexterity; yet almost his first essay in polemics was a squib against Marx’s capital.
He helped to make Fabianism Fabian and to determine its trailblazer policy of passive, measured evolution without struggle to social democracy, yet he calls on the ‘impecunious mobs’ to utilize the same aggression against the capitalists as the capitalists have already used against them.
What emerges in this tome, is a depiction of Shaw’s thought as a template of creative negations.
The moral underpinnings of his political ideas were in fact scarred by so many divergences: the utilitarian politics of welfare set against the republican politics of virtue; contrasting views of human nature; contrary ideas of goodness (as cheerfulness or flawlessness); and the competing demands of individualism and collectivism.
Discussion of these polarities offers an insight into the prevailing concerns of Shaw’s thought, political and philosophical, revealing the links between his dissimilar activities over many decades, while still acknowledging the violent changes in direction and the ambiguities and contradictions which characterize his argument.
Read this book to know more. Form your own supposition.
Trust me; he was not a Socialist by a distant stretch.
Author: Gareth Griffith
Publisher: Routledge; 1st edition (23 March 1995)
Language: English
Paperback: 320 pages
Item Weight: 454 g
Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.85 x 23.39 cm
Price: 5425/-
Was he a Socialist?
For Shaw, politics and religion were thoroughly intertwined in that the world had to be arranged in ways that aided the Life Force in its work; thus, a secular game plan was obligatory to complement his cosmology.
While he chooses the word ‘political’ as a subtitle for just four of them, every one of his plays is not only stoutly engaged with specific issues of his time but wholly invested in exploring the question of how to organize ourselves most equitably and most productively. Even before the outbreak of world war, the Victorian answer to that question seemed perilously close to unravelling.
And yet where the British labour movement was concerned, therefore, he was perhaps the most influential of all socialist propagandists.
Together with his fellow polymath, H.G.Wells, he mapped out the contours of the progressive cause in Britain and beyond. Shaw was like a machine, producing ideas and opinions at a constant rate over seventy years, stretching and pulling the mindof his audience, tugging at its conscience, trying its nerve and tweaking its prejudices.
He was one of the master intellectuals of his age, a prince in the universe of progressive thought.
So what are we to make of him?
Importing into Marx his own abstract bourgeois morality and then condemning Marx for moral romanticism, Shaw was unable to develop his natural bent for dialectics into truly scientific dialectics.
He has remained the living contradiction; and for this reason his readers and audiences have been so often at a loss whether or not to take him seriously.
The compassion of capitalism stirs him to fuming abhorrence; yet no cleverer resistance of capitalism has ever been made than Shaw’s picture of the Nietzschean capitalist following his normal intuitions with the incorruptibility of an animal.
Shaw has the reputation of a morally upright rationalist, whose head rules his heart; yet he has felt more deeply and overwhelmingly than he has thought, and the instincts and sentiments which his bourgeois egoism has suppressed have partially found release in bourgeois theology and over-romanticizing.
For years he worked with indefatigable commitment for the cause of socialism, and in his polemics both by spoken and the written word routed its enemies with unparalleled dexterity; yet almost his first essay in polemics was a squib against Marx’s capital.
He helped to make Fabianism Fabian and to determine its trailblazer policy of passive, measured evolution without struggle to social democracy, yet he calls on the ‘impecunious mobs’ to utilize the same aggression against the capitalists as the capitalists have already used against them.
What emerges in this tome, is a depiction of Shaw’s thought as a template of creative negations.
The moral underpinnings of his political ideas were in fact scarred by so many divergences: the utilitarian politics of welfare set against the republican politics of virtue; contrasting views of human nature; contrary ideas of goodness (as cheerfulness or flawlessness); and the competing demands of individualism and collectivism.
Discussion of these polarities offers an insight into the prevailing concerns of Shaw’s thought, political and philosophical, revealing the links between his dissimilar activities over many decades, while still acknowledging the violent changes in direction and the ambiguities and contradictions which characterize his argument.
Read this book to know more. Form your own supposition.
Trust me; he was not a Socialist by a distant stretch.
Displaying 1 of 1 review