American Political Science Review, Page 1 of 14 doi:10.1017/S0003055417000508 c  American Political Science Association 2017 Pragmatism and Prophecy: H. G. Wells and the Metaphysics of Socialism DUNCAN BELL University of Cambridge R ead throughout the world, H. G. Wells was one of the most famous political thinkers of the early twentieth century. During the first half of the 1900s, he elaborated a bold and idiosyncratic cosmopolitan socialist vision. In this article, I offer a new reading of Wells’s political thought. I argue that he developed a distinctive pragmatist philosophical orientation, which he synthesized with his commitments to Darwinian evolutionary theory. His pragmatism had four main components: a nominalist metaphysics; a verificationist theory of truth; a Jamesian “will to believe”; and a conception of philosophy as an intellectual exercise dedicated to improving practice. His political thought was shaped by this philosophical orientation. Wells, I contend, was the most high-profile pragmatist political thinker of the opening decades of the twentieth century. Acknowledging this necessitates a re-evaluation of both Wells and the history of pragmatism. All the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression. H. G. Wells, First and Last Things INTRODUCTION H . G. Wells (1866–1946) was one of the most famous political thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. Having made a name for himself writing “scientific romances” during the 1890s, he turned to elaborating a bold and idiosyn- cratic socialist vision. To his admirers he was a prophet, divining the contours of the future with unparalleled insight. To his critics he was either a dangerous radical, intent on smashing the established order, or a dreamer of hopeless dreams. Wells, Bertrand Russell observed, was “one of those who made Socialism respectable in England,” and he had a “very considerable influence upon the generation that followed him” (1956, 79). Even George Orwell, a fierce critic, acknowledged his impact. “Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century,” he wrote in 1941, “are in some sense Wells’s own creation,” and nobody writ- ing in English in the first two decades of the century “influenced the young so much” (1970, 172). Wells advocated a vanguardist cosmopolitan social- ism. It was cosmopolitan insofar as it aimed to replace the system of sovereign states and empires with a world state. It was socialist insofar as it sought a “regenerate world—cleansed of suffering and sorrow,” a world in Duncan Bell is a Reader in Political Thought and International Re- lations, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3BU (dsab2@cam.ac.uk). I’d like to thank the following for their valuable comments on the paper: Michael Bacon, Ori Beck, Sarah Cole, Hannah Dawson, Sarah Fine, Michael Frazer, Joel Isaac, Simon James, Alex Livingston, Patrick Parrinder, and Quentin Skinner, as well as the APSR referees and Editor. The paper benefited from presentations at the University of East Anglia and the Institute for Historical Research. Invaluable financial support was provided by the Leverhulme Trust. All the usual disclaimers apply. Received: April 25, 2017; revised: July 10, 2017; accepted: October 07, 2017. which the depredations of capitalism were substituted for a new order grounded in “universal brotherhood” (1908, 20; 2016b, 71). And it was vanguardist insofar as the primary agents of change—and the ideal rulers of the future society—were a transnational technocratic elite. In addition to proselytizing worldwide transfor- mation, Wells was a vocal contributor to quotidian po- litical debate over a wide array of issues, including edu- cation policy, social reform, imperial governance, mili- tary strategy, gender relations, and the failings of exist- ing democratic institutions. His influence extended far beyond the shores of Britain, and by the outbreak of the First World War he was a global intellectual celebrity. He found an especially receptive audience among Pro- gressive thinkers in the United States (Bell, forthcom- ing). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charles Merriam recorded in American Po- litical Ideas, Wells was one of a select group of British writers who exerted a substantial influence on Ameri- can political thought (1920, 467–8). The Chicago soci- ologists Robert Burgess and Ernest Park labelled him “our present major prophet” (1921, 496). Although not a great political theorist, Wells was a highly imagina- tive and provocative thinker, who helped shape public debate on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Wells regarded philosophical reflection as an essen- tial activity: “Every man who thinks must think upon a philosophical framework, explicit or implicit” (1904, 380). Ratiocination issued in action-guidance. “‘What am I to do?’ is the perpetual question of our exis- tence. Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as subsidiary to that and have no significance without it” (2016b, 53). He was clear about the connections between his philosophy and his politics. “[A]ll my thinking rests,” he insisted in a “Note to the Reader” originally appended to A Modern Utopia, on “hereti- cal metaphysical scepticism” (2005a, xxxi). Yet Wells’s philosophical views, and their connection to his politi- cal thought, have not been explored adequately. In this article, I reconstruct his philosophical commitments and demonstrate how they inflected his political vision in the two decades before the First World War. This was the most intellectually creative period of Wells’s life, and the time when he emerged as a major transatlantic 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . Pendlebury Library of Music, on 02 Jan 2018 at 16:33:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000508