Irish playwright, the leading pamphleteer of the Fabian Society and 1925 Nobel laureate in literature
Joining the Fabian Society in 1884, he wrote its first manifesto and edited Fabian Essays in Socialism, becoming the leading voice of gradualist socialism.
A playwright and critic born in Dublin who moved to London in 1876. Converted to socialism by Henry George and Marx, he joined the Fabian Society in 1884 and became the voice of its gradualism: achieving socialism by permeating parliament and the existing parties. He wrote more than sixty plays, including Arms and the Man, Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. He condemned both sides in the First World War, and in later life praised Mussolini and Stalin and came to favour dictatorship. He advocated eugenics. He died aged 94 in 1950.
Activities and affiliations
-
1884–1950
Literature and arts
-
1884–1950
Ideology and propaganda
From Fabian socialism to praise of dictators
Hearing Henry George speak in 1882 and reading Progress and Poverty awakened his interest in economics; at meetings of the Social Democratic Federation he discovered Marx and spent much of 1883 reading Capital, but finding its leader Hyndman autocratic he did not join. He joined the Fabian Society in 1884, wrote its first manifesto that year, entered its executive in 1885 and recruited Sidney Webb and Annie Besant. Meetings of the British Economic Association moved him from Marxism to gradualism, and after the violent breaking-up of the Trafalgar Square rally on “Bloody Sunday” in 1887 he became convinced of the folly of challenging police power. He then accepted Webb’s “permeation”: achieving socialism by infiltrating people and ideas into the existing parties. He edited Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), and his tract What Socialism Is (1890) assured readers that socialism could be brought about constitutionally through democratic institutions. In 1895 he and the Webbs founded the London School of Economics. He kept the society neutral in the Boer War, prompting Ramsay MacDonald and others to resign, and though nominated as a Fabian delegate he did not attend the founding of the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party. He was a London borough councillor from 1897 to 1903. In the early 1920s he hailed Lenin as “the one really interesting statesman in Europe”, and on a 1931 visit to the Soviet Union called Stalin “a Georgian gentleman” without malice. From the late 1920s he largely abandoned Fabian gradualism and, praising Mussolini and Stalin, came to believe that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement; in 1933 he called Hitler “a very able man” while criticising his “Judeophobia”. He also spoke at the World League for Sexual Reform’s 1929 London congress.