Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: semitism and the cultural realm
- 2 The promised land of liberalism: Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot
- 3 Empire and anarchy: John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling
- 4 The ‘socialism of fools’: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
- 5 The limits of liberalism: Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton
- 6 Modernism and ambivalence: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot
- 7 Conclusion: semitism and the crisis of representation
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The ‘socialism of fools’: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: semitism and the cultural realm
- 2 The promised land of liberalism: Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot
- 3 Empire and anarchy: John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling
- 4 The ‘socialism of fools’: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
- 5 The limits of liberalism: Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton
- 6 Modernism and ambivalence: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot
- 7 Conclusion: semitism and the crisis of representation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?
George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors (London, 1891), p. 8… I have always refused to be enlightened and sympathetic about the Jewish Question. From my cosmopolitan standpoint it is a question that ought not to exist.
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934), p. 353INTRODUCTION
Whereas John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling privileged ‘race’ within the sphere of Empire, the fiction, drama and social criticism of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells offered a vision of the world which understood semitic racial difference in terms of an ordered ‘scientific’ socialism. As part of a radical anti-capitalist tradition, late Victorian constructions of ‘the Jew’ were a potent symbol of capitalist disorder. Instead of the Arnoldian ‘cultural’ transfiguration of individual Jews, a socialist rationalism was predicated on, among much else, the disappearance of all forms of Jewish particularity. By imagining the transcendence of Jewish racial difference, the ‘socialism of fools’ (as it became known) also associated the universalized ‘Jew’ with the emerging utopian world order. Jews, in this way, were at the heart of socialist expectations concerning the radical transformation of society which, in contradictory fashion, also encompassed definitions of Judaism as being irredeemably capitalist.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and SocietyRacial Representations, 1875–1945, pp. 94 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993