December 2023: H.G. Wells, Technocracy and Liberty
Please join us in December 2023 for a Virtual Reading Group with Alberto Mingardi.
Pre-registration is required, and we ask you to register only if you can be present for ALL sessions. Some readings must be acquired in advance. You may use promo code VRG2023 to receive 35% off your purchase at Liberty Fund Books. Participants who successfully complete ALL sessions will be eligible to receive an Amazon e-gift certificate.
Novelist H.G. Wells (1866-1946) is still beloved for some of the most brilliant stories of the early 20th century: from The Time Machine to the Invisible Man, quite a lot of his prose survived the test of time, has been brilliantly adapted by Hollywood and is still part of our collective imagination.
Still, Wells keeps being part of the contemporaneous discussion - albeit perhaps not so openly - as an early advocate for the scientific management of society. Close to the Fabians (with whom he had quarrels), a disciple of Thomas Huxley, Wells helped popularizing the idea that a better scientific understanding of reality needed planning.
For this very reason, he was a bete-noire of F.A. Hayek, who criticized him publicly and singled him out as an example of those conceited yet pusillanimous intellectuals he so often criticized.
This VRG aims at comparing the ideas of Wells and Huxley, but also wishes to provide the participant with a broader understanding of Wells’s approaches and motives.
Session I: Thursday, December 7, 2023, 12:00-1:00 pm EST, On H.G. Wells
The first session will focus on some secondary literature to help providing the participants with a better understanding of Wells: his context, his polar stars, his ambitions.
Readings:
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939, London, Faber & Faber, 1992, chapter “H.G. Wells Getting Rid of People”, pp. 118-134
Paul Cantor, “The Invisible Man" and the Invisible Hand: H. G. Wells's Critique of Capitalism,” The American Scholar, vol. 68 n.3, 1999, pp. 89-102
Martin Gardner, “H. G. Wells in Russia Wells Had a Defective Vision of Lenin's Communist State”, The Freeman, May 1995
Session II: Thursday, December 14, 2023, 12:00-1:00 pm EST, Wells and Utopia
The second session will present some samples of Wells’ “scientific Utopianism”: two from the early 1900s (his Fabian period, so to say) work, one from his later days.
Readings:
H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, London, Chapman & Hall, 1902, chapter 5 “The Life-history of Democracy”, pp. 143-175
H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, London, Fisher Unwin, 1905, chapter 3 “Utopian Economics”, pp. 70-112
H.G. Wells, The Fate of Man, New York, Longman Greens, 1939, chapter 8 “What Man Has to Learn”, p. 64
Session III: Thursday, December 21, 2023, 12:00-1:00 pm EST, Hayek vs Wells
The third session will provide a sketch of Hayek’s rejoinder, with two texts in which Hayek openly mentioned and attacked Wells (the chapters from The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit) and one indirect criticism of Wells and his kind of intellectuals. The presence of pieces both from Hayek’s 1944 bestseller and 1988 intellectual testament will help in acknowledging if and how he adjusted his arguments over time, changing their tone and perhaps fine tuning them.
Readings:
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944, chapter 6 “Planning and the Rule of Law”, pp. 72-87
F.A. Hayek, “Planning, Science and Freedom” now in F.A. Hayek, Socialism and War. Essays, Documents, Reviews, ed. by Bruce Caldwell, Indianapolis, LibertyFund, 2009, pp. 213-220
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism, ed. by W.W. Bartley III, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991 (1988), , chapter 4 “The Revolt of Instinct and Reason”, pp. 48-65.
Virtual Reading Groups
- One Fell Swoop: Reading All of Shakespeare’s Plays
- December 2023: H.G. Wells, Technocracy and Liberty
- November 2023: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War: the Gettysburg Address
- September 2023: Islam and Liberty
- September 2023: H. L. Mencken on Commerce, Culture, and Democracy
- August 2023: The Price of Power: Bring Up the Bodies and The Prince
- July 2023: Civil Society and Political Economy
- June 2023: The Challenges of Democracy in a Diverse Society
- April 2023: Understanding Reconstruction - the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments
- March 2023: Foundations of Modern Environmentalism
- February 2023: Bruno Leoni: Freedom and the Law
- January 2023: Oakeshott’s Moral Vision
- January 2023: The Messiness of Progress: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and David Hume’s Essays and Histories
- December 2022: Classical Tragedy and the World of Ideas
- December 2022: J.S. Mill “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion"
- November 2022: The Election of 1800: Jefferson v. Adams
- October 2022: Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy
- September 2022: The Evolution of American Federalism
- September 2022: Liberty and Virtue in the Axial Age
- August 2022: Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Aristocracy, Independence, and Economics
- May 2022: THE BILL OF RIGHTS: SELECT CASES IN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
- April 2022: Education in a Free Society
- March 2022: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Women
- March 2022: Ancient v Modern Liberty
- February 2022: Joseph Schumpeter’s “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy”
- January 2022: James Madison and the Conflict Between the Executive and Legislative Branches
- November 2021: Pericles' Funeral Oration
- September 2021: Celebrate Constitution Day
- August 2021: Agriculture, the State, and Liberty
- June 2021: Adam Ferguson’s History of Civil Society
- May 2021: The Colonial Origins of the Bill of Rights