The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

Wilde uses disease as a metaphor for poverty and medicinal remedies as a metaphor for charity. The metaphor explains why he’s critical of charity as a concept; he believes that it will never solve the problem of poverty, which is inherent to the system of private poverty and merely exacerbated by “remedies” that rely on private property. This leads to him presenting a solution in the form of socialism.

“We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.”

Wilde sees material want as an inherent barrier to the individualism he espouses; consequently, anyone who would tacitly accept their poverty (by accepting charity) lacks awareness of their own degradation. His praise for those who resist their social status also foreshadows his broader claims about The Danger of Authority and the good that comes of opposing it. As all authority suppresses personality, resisting authority is an initial step toward individualism.

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

Wilde here alludes to the Christian notion of “original sin” and to the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, reframing disobedience as virtuous. The allusion exemplifies Wilde’s unorthodox interpretation of Christianity, which reflects his overall attitude toward authority. The essay will go on to reference instances of the kind of constructive disobedience Wilde has in mind—for example, the French Revolution.

“To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”

The Vendée is a region in France that became the site of a counterrevolution during the French Revolution. Wilde’s allusion to the lower-class people who died fighting for the aristocracy further develops his criticism of the so-called “virtuous” poor: What Wilde finds “tragic” about these “starved peasants” is their ignorance of how total their own oppression was.

“Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.”

Expanding on his critique of authority, Wilde establishes that he considers all forms of control harmful to those experiencing them. This is why he supports socialism: Every individual must have the resources to make their own choices. However, he is clear that socialism itself must not compel individuals to work in order to ensure a supply of basic necessities; this is where machine labor comes in.

“An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.”

This is an appeal to logic: Wilde points out how unstable the system of private property is. As Wilde’s readers would have been mostly middle- or upper-class, the example is pointed in its implication that capitalism is at least potentially unjust even to those it seems to benefit. Wilde’s contention that “What a man really has, is what is in him” echoes his prior point about capitalism substituting material goods for inner spirit.

“There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.”

This passage appears in the context of a discussion of Christianity, which Wilde sees as individualist at heart. Nevertheless, Wilde does not prescribe it to anyone who does not find it useful, as his fundamental claim is that each individual is unique and should be free to develop according to their own unique path.

“It [democracy] has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.”

Wilde implies that more authoritarian forms of government may actually be preferable to democratic ones in that extreme oppression is more likely to produce a backlash. By contrast, “milder” forms of authority suppress individuality so subtly—even pleasantly, via “prizes and rewards”—that there is little material incentive to resist. Nevertheless, Wilde argues that such resistance is necessary, as authority prevents all people (even those who wield it) from attaining their full humanity.

“It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him.”

Wilde argues that Socialism Supports Aestheticism because the capitalist necessity of “making a living” destroys the purpose of art by forcing artists to cater to other people’s tastes. Freedom from such material considerations will allow artists to create art for the sake of art, as Wilde argues is the purpose of all artistic expression.

“The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.”

Wilde uses the metaphor of a club to equate the ideological authority of public opinion to physical violence (a repeated parallel in his essay). This quote also demonstrates his use of capital nouns to distinguish art and beauty as ideas (and ideals) from the imperfect manifestations of both that the current society produces.

“If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive.”

Wilde’s definition of authority becomes more abstract as he considers how people engage with art. While Wilde certainly objects to the literal exercise of authority over art (e.g., censorship), he also discourages any approach to a work that is not on the work’s own terms. Seeking to bend a work to suit one’s own ideas represents a failure to respect the individuality of the artist. The kind of “receptivity” Wilde outlines here anticipates his later, broader claim that a true individualist appreciates individualism in others.

“But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”

Here, Wilde presents an aphorism (a pithy saying) to summarize his focus on the artist as an important herald of societal change. Since (Wilde argues) artists are among the few people who embody individualism in society as it exists, it follows that all people will be like artists in an individualist future.

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.”

Wilde anticipates that opponents will see his argument, and perhaps individualism broadly, as “selfish”—a word with negative connotations. He responds by casting the accusation back at the accuser, arguing that what is truly selfish is trying to impose oneself on everyone else.