On H.G. Wells, World Order, Spontaneous Order, and some Graeber and Michael Polanyi

A few years ago, I read an as-of-yet-published manuscript by Chris Brooke (Cambridge) on the significance of functional integration in liberal ideas about federalism, especially in the nineteenth century. And this alerted me to a style of argument that seems to originate in Molesworth (not himself a liberal) and is very salient in Adam Smith and Cobden.

Another Cambridge scholar, Duncan Bell, and his former student (I think) Or Roisenbom (see, especially her (2017) The Emergence of Globalism), now in Bologna, have been writing perceptively about twentieth century views of federalism. They called attention to the significance of the writings of H.G. Wells (yes the sci-fi Wells) in these debates. Bell and I share a fascination with the possible role of sci fi and utopian literature in political theory (although I limit my reflections on it to these digressions).

Somebody else may use the previous two paragraphs to begin to write something about the ‘new Cambridge school’ of political theory. Prompted by Bell last week I read H.G. Wells’ (1940) The New World Order. If you are my age you may associate this phrase with Bush (Sr’s) post-cold-war-post-first-Iraq-war language. However, in the long pamphlet, Wells proposes (I quote Wikipedia) “a framework of international functionalism that could guide the world towards achieving world peace. To achieve these ends, Wells asserted that a socialist and scientifically planned world government would need to be formed to defend human rights.” Now many of the federal and world government projects of the age, are really just thinly disguised ways for Europeans to hold onto empire and colony. But Wells is notably anti-racist and anti-sexist throughout, and clearly proposes otherwise.

In today’s post I want to focus on two themes. First, unlike many contemporary friends who partake in the revival of Marxist and socialist thought we find on college campuses, Wells faces the disaster of Leninist-Stalinist thought in forthright manner. And so he recognizes that a socialist world state has non-trivial risks. His core response rests on a faith in human rights and freedom of speech. I quote the central summary of his position on the ‘new type of revolution’ (the title of chapter 8) that he offers:

This new and complete Revolution we contemplate can be defined in a very few words. It is (a) outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed, plus (b) a sustained insistence upon law, law based on a fuller, more jealously conceived resentment of the personal Rights of Man, plus (c) the completest freedom of speech, criticism and publication, and sedulous expansion of the educational organisation to the ever-growing demands of the new order. What we may call the eastern or Bolshevik Collectivism, the Revolution of the Internationale, has failed to achieve even the first of these three items and it has never even attempted the other two.

Putting it at its compactest, it is the triangle of Socialism, Law and Knowledge, which frames the Revolution which may yet save the world.—Chapter 8 (“The New Type of Revolution”)

In context, this confirms the suspicion, most famously articulated by James Burnham in the (1941) The Managerial Revolution, that this new world order would empower the technocratic and literary class of scientists, planners, lawyers (who defend rights), educators, and the clerisy (who articulate speech). Wells is himself not much interested in the managers; he is really concerned about the social instability generated by unemployed and bored young-ish men, and he thinks that planned socialism is the full employment solution (and the intellectual diversions it can generate) to the threat they offer.

For Wells a free press and a robust human rights regime are a counterweight to the threat of concentrated power in a state bureaucracy. But, unfortunately, Wells does not seem to realize that under socialism there is little reason to expect an independent judiciary and press to survive a determined global (!) bureaucracy or socialist party’s control, and, turn them into a dead-letter. What the then contemporary ordoliberals grasp (and Burnham also recognizes in the Machiavellians), when faced with the disaster of national-socialism, is that concentrated power cannot be checked by formal rules and laws alone.

Of course, to note that is not identical to endorse the status quo in which speech and rights are imperfectly protected and shaped by the interests of the financially privileged. We have not solved the way political power supports rights, rather than undermines them: In its rather sober and gloomy annual report (2023) Human Rights Watch wrote, ‘we need to reimagine how power in the world is exercised, and that all governments not only have the opportunity but the responsibility to take action to protect human rights within and beyond their borders.’ And my own view is that, perhaps, human rights are not the right vehicle at all to achieve (for lack of a better term) minimum dignity. (About that some other time more.)

Second, when, in the concluding chapter 12, Wells confronts what I like to call the ‘transition problem’ (how to get from here to there, we might say), he explicitly rejects the great man or ‘divine legislator’ approach (familiar from the Ancients and Rousseau):

Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder.

Of course, since Wells is so alert to the problems with and dangers of Leninist vanguardism and the dictatorship of the proletariat (see chapter 4, especially), this leaves it prima facie mysterious how the transition problem can be solved. Wells’ resolution of this challenge is rather surprising because he ends up giving the most lovely description of how technological progress is possible under an anarchic, advanced division of cognitive labor. Do pay attention to the details because it is explicitly anti-racist:

We can find a small-scale parallel to the probable development of a new world order in the history of flying. Less than a third of a century ago, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have told you that flying was impossible; kites and balloons and possibly even a navigable balloon, they could imagine; they had known of such things for a hundred years; but a heavier then air machine, flying in defiance of wind and gravity! That they knew was nonsense. The would-be aviator was the typical comic inventor. Any fool could laugh at him. Now consider how completely the air is conquered.

And who did it? Nobody and everybody. Twenty thousand brains or so, each contributing a notion, a device, an amplification. They stimulated one another; they took off from one another. They were like excited ganglia in a larger brain sending their impulses to and fro. They were people of the most diverse race and colour. You can write down perhaps a hundred people or so who have figured conspicuously in the air, and when you examine the rôle they have played, you will find for the most part that they are mere notorieties of the Lindbergh type who have put themselves modestly but firmly in the limelight and can lay no valid claim to any effective contribution whatever. You will find many disputes about records and priority in making this or that particular step, but the lines of suggestion, the growth and elaboration of the idea, have been an altogether untraceable process. It has been going on for not more than a third of a century, under our very eyes, and no one can say precisely how it came about. One man said "Why not this?" and tried it, and another said "Why not that?" A vast miscellany of people had one idea in common, an idea as old as Dædalus, the idea that "Man can fly". Suddenly, swiftly, it got about - that is the only phrase you can use - that flying was attainable. And man, man as a social being, turned his mind to it seriously, and flew.

So it will certainly be with the new world order, if ever it is attained. A growing miscellany of people are saying - it is getting about - that "World Pax is possible", a World Pax in which men will be both united and free and creative. It is of no importance at all that nearly every man of fifty and over receives the idea with a pitying smile. Its chief dangers are the dogmatist and the would-be "leader" who will try to suppress every collateral line of work which does not minister to his supremacy. This movement must be, and it must remain, manyheaded.

What’s interesting to me about this passage is two-fold: first, it clearly anticipates the mobilization and distributive participation strategy that has become so popular since (say) Occupy among activist circles. And I really wish I could write (the very well-read) David Graeber to find out whether he read a lot of Wells as a kid, and, in particular, New World Order. I did find a non-trivial reference to Wells in a (2012) paper, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” by Graeber:

Some of those science fiction fantasies (at this point we can’t know which ones) could have been brought into being. For earlier generations, many science fiction fantasies had been brought into being. Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, then why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?— [Emphasis in original]

Second, Wells clearly anticipates here the structural features of Michael Polanyi’s analysis of the emergence of knowledge in a spontaneous order within the republic of science familiar from, say, (1941) “The Growth of Thought in Society.” In this case, we know that Polanyi had been once an avid reader of Wells from an autobiographical letter he seems to have sent to Karl Mannheim, in which he describes himself as “a materialist and an eager disciple of H. G. Wells.”—Charles Thorpe "Community and the market in Michael Polanyi's philosophy of science." Modern Intellectual History 6.1 (2009): 64. Unfortunately this letter is from 9 April 1944, so it is not obvious this would include A New World Order.

However, what Wells’ parable elides is the role of capital and organization by investors, armed forces, entrepreneurs, and corporations in making safe and mass air-travel possible (not to mention the role of a credit economy that shapes Polanyi’s analysis). That is to say, lurking in Wells is the thought — a kind of idealism on steroids — that a noble and worthy ideal will be self-actualizing if it grips a sufficient number of people. I don’t think Wells is alone in holding such a view — regular readers know I have diagnosed it in the liberalism of the last half century. And so there is no reason to be self-congratulatory in diagnosing this limitation in Wells.