Why are you assuming that the novel is prescriptive? It’s fiction after all. Most of Wells’s scientific romances (the conventional name for this genre) express very mixed feelings towards what was being debated and forcasted as “progress.” After all, think about The Time Machine and its prediction of the future. If you want to know what Wells really thought you should read some of his essays. In fact he broke from the Fabians in part because he worried that they were too statist.
Totalitarianism didn’t get a bad name until Hitler and Stalin showed the world how it affects real people. It was a very popular concept among the educated upper-classes prior to WWII.
Of course, they envisioned themselves on the top of the heap, benevolently telling the great unwashed how to live their lives.
H.G. Wells, visionary though he was, was also notoriously wonky in his views of contemporary politics of his time - prehaps because he was seduced by his own vision of a benevolent world-state, and so willing to overlook the excesses of those who (like Stalin) appeared on the surface at least to be working towards the goals he approved of.
He allegedly wrote of Stalin in the New Statesman mag: “I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest”. Though he later decided that Stalin was ‘too rigid’ to be the leader of his ideal world state.
Welles was not really out of line with the popular Left for most of his life. In fact, he was popular among Progressives precisely for those views. Wonky? Yes - according to us. But not to those of his own time and place. He was far more a man of it than Orwell, and tened to be clear-eyed in precisely those ways Orwell was not.
I don’t get it. So what if he was not out of line with the left? Claiming Stalin was a good guy is wonky in my book, and if that is “clear-eyed” I think I’d rather side with Orwell.
Where does Welles claim that Stalin was a good guy? Lots of people writing at the beginning of the twentieth century believed in a gradual evolution toward a world state–and Welles believed that internationalist organizations like the League of Nations were a temporary step in that direction (so did Woodrow Wilson of course). As Welles’s own novels make clear “socialism” was a mainstream (though not precisely dominant) political idea during this period. In Britain its ideals were promoted through the Labour Party–the same Labour Party that you have today though, to be sure, that party would now describe itself as social democratic rather than socialist and also, since the Blair years, it is not consistently social democratic either (the latter tradition is considerably stronger in Germany and France).
You can certainly say that Welles a) thought of himself as a socialist, b) anticipated the founding of a world state (which he thought would obviate destructive wars like the devastating WWI) and c) promoted both socialist and internationalist forms of politics. But you can’t say that he was a totalitarian because he was highly concerned with individual freedom. And the interesting thing about his fiction–even very prose-ish ficiton like A Modern Utopian is that it tends to portray utopian schemes as at least partly dystopic. Something Welles was highly aware of. These tensions and ironies are what makes his fiction interesting to read.
I didn’t say Wells was a totalitarian; rather, he was naively willing to overlook the crimes of contemporary totalitarians of his day, such as Stalin, because he mistakenly thought they embodied his utopian ideals, albeit in primitive form.
The Wells commentary on Stalin was from an article he wrote in the leftish mag New Statesman in the '30s. He famously visited the Soviet Union, interviewed Stalin, and came away convinced that Stalin was basically a good and much-unjustly-maligned leader, albeit too ‘rigid’ in his thinking.
That’s strange, because in The Shape of Things to Come, the first section (expounding on history up to to Wells’s day) disparages both Marx and Stalin, while admiring Lenin. It portrays Marxism as an early failed attempt at applying scientific rationalism to sociology and politics, hamstrung by Marx’s vanity, dogmaticism and simplistic antagonism to the bourgoise class, while portraying Stalin as having abandoned the internationalism of the “true” future order.
As for gradual social evolution, the novel condemns the notion of historical inevitability, and flatly says that the new order was something that had to be conciously built. That the alternative (the supposedly inevitable collapse of civilization) was something that was all too possible if decisive action wasn’t taken. The novel actually uses the phrase “universal conquest” to describe the ambitions of the World State.
Finally, I don’t know what to make of the assertion that the novel is at least partly a tongue in cheek disutopia, and that Wells was playing devil’s advocate in some of things it says. I suppose I would have to compare it with Wells’s non-fiction writings, which is a bit more than I can research at the moment.
Wells became disillusioned with Stalin and Russian Communism - not because Stalin was a monsterous, ruthless criminal dictator, or because the Russian style of Communism murdered and “disappeared” millions, but rather because he lost his initial faith that Russian Communism could lead to the future one-world-state that he envisioned and passionately hoped for: he thought that Stalin was ‘too rigid and orthodox’ in his thinking.
In short, he was willing to overlook the crimes of a totalitarian like Stalin. What he was not willing to overlook was that Stalin wasn’t really leading the Soviet Union to Wells’ ideal one-world state.
Wells (together with other prominent thinkers like G.B. Shaw) was convinced, for example, that there was no famine in the Soviet Union (in spite of what is now recognized as an active attempt to genocide ethnic Ukranians via famine), and actively spread the news that rumours of a famine were anti-Soviet propaganda - documented in this book (unfortunately text unavailable online): http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/communism/com107.html
Together with the aforementioned New Statesman article depicting Stalin as a “good” leader, the impression is that Wells, like so many idealists, was perfectly willing to be ‘willfully blind’ to the crimes of the totalitarians because he shared to an extent the idealism that the totalitarians made use of.
Do recall he was the man who publicly called for liberal Fascists. Oh, I’ll gran you he didn’t intend for the future to be mean and cruel. But he did, in point of fact, call for a future of rule by the rationalists. And that, unfortunately, soon turns into the most irrational thing imaginable. There are no human rationalists, and those who believe they are soon turn into something very ugly.
And he did mean what he said. He thought of the future as being ruled by men who could see past all tradition and obstacles to usher in a technocratic golden age of perfection, where every problem was defeated by massed power of state rulers armed with slide-rules. It was really Plato’s old dream of the philosopher-King, which never worked out like Plato intended. A Saint and King, sometimes - they udnerstand human wakness and see it in themselves. The problem with philosophers as Kings is that they become mortally tempted to believe in their own wisdom, and mortally desperate to see their grandiose schemes put in place.
Welles was clear-eyed in that he was a man aiming for solutions, even if he didn’t have them. Orwell had nothing to offere but warnings and naysaying. And his vision of socialism was ludicrous, even though it was a fairly mild form of the madness for the day. Orwell barely had an idea of what he wanted, let alone any will to do something to get there. Welles, even if he terribly wrong, at least tried to lay out some ideas of what to do.
I think they were both wrong. Both men were prone to utter nonsense, one for nonsense that was unfashionable and one that was fashionable. It would have been frightening to think of someone who combined their best traits, and damn scary to imagine a man who combined their worst.
Now, whatever you might think about the workability or the justice of that vision, it is neither ludicrous nor vague. Nor, to return to the OP, totalitarian. (And, no, state socialism is not totalitarian-by-definition.)
I certainly do not agree with Orwell’s politics in totality (I’m only a “socialist” in the limited sense of believing that the government has a role to play in providing certain social services, not in the ‘state owning the means of production’ sense), but I do not agree that Orwell was nothing but a nay-sayer.
Rather, Orwell was a man who did not let his idealism blind him to the realities-on-the-ground. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War beat that sort of idealism right out of him.
That, more than anything else, and far more significantly than the differences in their ideals, was the difference between Orwell and Wells. Wells allowed himself to be lead down the path by Stalin because he lacked that sensibility; he was focused on his utopia.
I wasn’t implying his commitments changed; only that he did not, like so many of his contemporaries (and more to the point like Wells), allow his ideals to wilfully blind him to the crimes of those professing similar ideals.
Idealism is often the enemy of common decency; it is to his credit that it was not so in his case. I say that, and I do not share his ideals.