The Failure of Politics

Abstract

Shaw’s political stance has always had the reputation of being difficult to pin down. Critics of the left say both that he is insufficiently rigorous as a Socialist — Lenin described him as ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’¹ — and that the Socialist in Shaw is constantly betrayed by the playwright. As Fabianism poses problems for hardline Socialists, so the plays pose problems for anyone wanting to read them as the expression simply of a Socialist political philosophy. Such difficulties are compounded by the fact that in some moods, and increasingly in the late political plays, Shaw comes close to a position of complete despair about man as a political animal. Hovering in the background of most of the late writings is the spirit of the King of Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels who, to quote Shaw’s words at the opening of Everybody’s Political What’s What, found mankind ‘incorrigibly villainous’.²

Man is a failure as a political animal.

(Geneva)

Were there any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated from sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the dayes of Methuselah. But age doth not rectifie, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.

(Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici)