Abstract
As has long been acknowledged, H. G. Wells was one of the twentieth century’s most insistent advocates of a world state. From the publicationof Anticipations in 1901 to his death in 1946, Wells evolved a political vision which rejected nationalism and free-market capitalism, and advanced global political institutions and (non-Communist) central planning as alternatives. In this chapter, I do not attempt to recapitulate Wells’ world-state thinking in its entirety,1 but I discuss an aspect of it that came late in Wells’ thinking, and which has been relatively neglected by scholars of Wells’ cosmopolitanism: the role of human-rights protection and government accountability.2
If democracy means economic justice and the attainment of that universal sufficiency that science assures us is possible today; if democracy means the intensest possible fullness of knowledge for everyone who desires to know and the greatest possible freedom of criticism and individual self-expression for anyone who desires to object; if democracy means a community saturated with the conception of a common social objective and with an educated will like the will of a team of football players to co-operate willingly and understandingly upon that objective; if democracy means a complete and unified police control throughout the world, to repress the financial scramble and gangster violence which constitute the closing phase of the sovereign state and private ownership system; then we have in democracy a conception of life for which every intelligent man and woman on earth may well be prepared to live, fight or die, as circumstances may require. (Wells 1939a, 70–1)
The more socialisation proceeds and the more directive authority is concentrated, the more necessary is an efficient protection of individuals from the impatience of well-meaning or narrow-minded or ruthless officials and indeed from all the possible abuses of advantage that are inevitable under such circumstances to our still childishly wicked breed. (Wells 1940b, 137)
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Partington, J.S. (2007). Human Rights and Public Accountability in H. G. Wells’ Functional World State. In: Morgan, D., Banham, G. (eds) Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210684_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210684_9
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