For my British Literature Class, we were given the task of reading Oscar Wilde’s (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/wilde_soul.html)]The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and writing a review of it. I thought I’d chat about it here to get some ideas for my paper.
I anticipated being repulsed, but I was pleasantly surprised. It turns out that Wilde was very close to many of the other individualist anarchists of the 19thcentury. I suspect that a concise education in economics would cause him to abandon socialism and his assertion that private property ought to be abolished in favor of market anarchism.
Case in point:
How beautiful is that? Of course, Wilde is approaching political philosophy from his perspective as aesthete, so he pretty much ignores economics. But he really does make some powerful critiques of democracy if one can put aside his use of the term “socialism” and really try to understand the gist of what he is saying.
Wilde attributes most social problems to selfishness, which “is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” He proceeds to define unselfishness as, “letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them” (1040). His obvious opposition to coercive interference in people’s lives (a task the state jealously guards its monopoly of) makes him, at a glance, appear to be a staunch laissez-faire capitalist and libertarian of the highest order. Yet, in the next breath, he advocates the forcible abolition of private property! He despises state coercion yet advocates that people’s property, the fruits of their labor, be stolen from them.
Says Wilde: “If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” Such indictments against the use of government to solve social and economic ills indicates that Wilde fundamentally understands that it is very exercise of coercive power in the first place that causes many of the problems for which we turn to government (i.e., the monopoly of coercive power) for solutions. Unfortunately, he fails to realize that men and women do not voluntarily give up their liberty and property. He seems to naively believes that the establishment of socialism, that system of collective ownership he so admires, can be achieved peacefully and without violence.
In other words, he finds socialism to be aesthetically pleasing and therefore wishes to establish it, reality be damned. If only he had met Benjamin Tucker or Boehm-Bawerk.
Thoughts?