Abstract
Were we to compare those who supported revolutionary social and political change with those who supported evolutionary change in Britain, we should find the latter a more numerous and probably more celebrated group. But we ought not to forget that, unlike revolution, which can be quite specific in meaning, evolution means many things to many people. Indeed, it would be more appropriate were we to present the initial comparison as between revolution and ‘not-revolution’, for we can be sure of only one piece of common ground as far as the evolutionists are concerned: they believe in the inappropriateness of revolution as a vehicle for social and political change. But their more positive beliefs run a very extensive gamut from paternalistic government of an authoritarian but welfare-conscious stamp to weak federal systems permitting the maximum amount of freedom to citizens to evolve as individuals. In short there may be as many, and indeed as distinct, differences between various kinds of evolutionists as between evolutionists and revolutionists.
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Notes
E. Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (London: Oxford University Press, 1939) p. 241.
A. M. Gibbs, Shaw (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969) p. 29.
Quoted in L. Hugo, Bernard Shaw, Playwright and Preacher (London: Methuen, 1971) p. 131.
J. P. Smith, Unrepentant Pilgrim (London: Victor Gollanz, 1966) p. 151.
R. M. Philmus and D. H. Hughes, Early Writings by H. G. Wells (London: University of California Press, 1975) p. 218.
H. G. Wells, Boon (London: Fisher Unwin, 1915) p. 152.
Quoted in N. Nicholson, H. G. Wells (London: Arthur Brooker, 1950) p. 43
Wells had always argued, though, that the central concern of ‘the so-called science of sociology’ ought to be what he called ‘utopography’. (See P. Parrinder, H. G. Wells (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1970).)
George Woodcock, in Dawn and the Darkest Hour (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) sets Out Huxley’s political philosophy as advocating ‘not only militant resistance to war, but also a policy of general social reorganisation aimed at replacing the institution of state… by a libertarian society in which… economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian and politics Kropotkinesque and cooperative’ (p. 14). All the same, Huxley offered no plan of how to reach this state of affairs!
Neil Harding, ‘Socialism and Violence’, in The Concept of Socialism (ed. Parekh) (London: Croom Helm, 1975) p. 204.
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© 1979 Stephen J. Ingle
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Ingle, S. (1979). The Gradualness of Inevitability. In: Socialist Thought in Imaginative Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04108-4_6
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