GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856–1950)

Summary

Shaw attended his first Fabian Society meeting on 10 May 1884. His meeting the previous year with Henry George, the American apostle of the single tax on the value of land, had given direction and impetus to Shaw's crash course of promiscuous reading and self-education. Convinced of the importance of the economic basis to social reform, Shaw read Ricardo, Smith, Mill and Marx in swift succession and joined the Economic Circle, composed of professional economists and London University lecturers. In deciding to join these groups Shaw was aligning himself with ‘a body of educated middle-class intelligentsia, my own class in fact’ rather than opting for the proletarian emphasis dominant in the socialist activities espoused by Morris.

The choice of Fabianism had wider ideological implications. The Fabian Essays of 1889 from which this essay is taken, represented a coherent statement of a collectivist political programme. The group had, however, initially come together in 1884 as one of the various free-thinking ethical societies proliferating in London, and, like others, drew its membership from many sources. Shaw's own development from the ‘libertarianism’ of such writers as Godwin, Shelley, Mill and Bradlaugh can be compared to the disillusionment of Annie Besant and Beatrice Potter (later Webb) with the evolutionary individualism of Herbert Spencer; but Hubert Bland's roots were in a paternalistic Tory reformism, Thomas Bolas's in the ‘municipal socialism’ of the Radical politician, Joseph Chamberlain.