The Soul of Man under Socialism: Maximum Freedom for the Individual

How can humanity develop its full potential? What conditions are needed so that all people can shape their lives according to their inclinations and talents? These are the questions preoccupying the Irish writer Oscar Wilde when he publishes the essay 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' in 1891. His answer? Above all it requires the greatest possible freedom for the individual. Everything that makes people dependent, externally determined, or restricted is to be abolished, in order to ensure the unfolding of their true inner nature. Among the things that restrict the individual in his freedom, Wilde counts among others gainful employment and the possession of private property. Unfortunately the essay remains in this respect rather abstract and long-winded, without offering real socioeconomic solutions. Instead the writer comments at length on the position of the artist in society, creating the impression that at bottom he is concerned with something else: not the maximum freedom of the individual in relation to economics, but the maximum freedom of the artist in relation to the public.

But let us begin with the problem of gainful employment as Wilde sees it. The basic idea is quite simple: if people must engage in wage labour in order to secure their survival, they are unfree. Especially if the work is monotonous and does not correspond to people's talents, interests, or inclinations. Related thoughts can be found also in many other intellectuals in the 19th century. Karl Marx, for example, writes that the labour relations arising with early industrialisation increasingly alienate the human being from himself. This figure of the factory worker performing entirely monotonous work that grinds him down mentally and physically is brilliantly portrayed in Fritz Lang's dystopian film Metropolis (1927). In England, William Morris -- artist, printer, and socialist -- fought with his arts and crafts movement, which he founded, for the preservation of the craft arts against mechanical industrialisation. Here too the central idea is that the human being can express himself meaningfully and creatively through his work.

While then the dependence of the wage labour relationship stands in the way of the individual's unfolding for Wilde, the possession of private property can enable precisely this unfolding. Thus Wilde explains the success of great writers like Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley, Robert Browning, Victor Hugo, and Charles Baudelaire. These could fully develop their personalities because as wealthy men they did not need to work a single day and therefore had the time and leisure for creative activity. This too is fundamentally intelligible: whoever comes home in the evening exhausted after a long tiring day's work will in all probability not sit down at a desk to write poetry. On the contrary. No one, says Wilde, thinks more about money than the poor. The person who has no money is forced to think of nothing else. How do I pay my next rent? What do I buy food with this month? Whoever is forced to think constantly about securing his livelihood has little space to think about other things -- to be creatively or artistically active, to invent things, to develop new ideas. This too is initially plausible.

The writer Virginia Woolf, for example, took up the thought that economic independence enables artistic freedom and applied it to the situation of women. In her famous essay 'A Room of One's Own' (1929) she considered why women are so underrepresented historically as writers. Her explanation: not because they were less gifted or less intelligent than men, but because they did not possess the economic means to create art. They had no property of their own but were financially and otherwise dependent on their husbands. Had they possessed the freedom 'to have a room of one's own' -- without maternal duties, without children's noise, without spectators -- and in addition a monthly income at their own disposal, there would probably have been many more women who had already written great literature earlier.

And with this we arrive at a major problem that Wilde sees in private property. Only very few people in society possess this economic freedom. In every generation there is a handful of individuals who produce great art, great inventions, great ideas. What could our world look like if more -- no, if all people -- had these possibilities? A beautiful idea, but Wilde's execution of it remains unfortunately incomplete. While the basic consideration that precarious labour relations or financial hardship restrict many people in their personality development is certainly understandable, from this it does not automatically follow what a better world might look like. In the essay Wilde speaks repeatedly of socialism as an alternative economic order that is to serve individualism, but what exactly this socialist social order might look like remains largely unclear.

In one thing, however, Wilde is quite explicit. Socialism must restrict people no more than capitalism. It must not, as authoritarian state socialism, replace old with new forms of regulation. Wilde turns very decisively against every form of authoritarian rule and thereby also against certain forms of authoritarian socialism. Maximum freedom for the individual is the libertarian's credo. This maximum freedom applies also and in particular to the artist. Only such art is considered good by the Irish writer as gives unrestricted expression to the nature of the creative artist, not allowing itself to be influenced by the taste of the masses, the expectations of the critics, or the moral ideas of society. The artist should listen only to himself, realise only himself, take no heed of what the public wants, ignore public opinion. Only then does he create true art.

Wilde is not the only representative of l'art pour l'art -- the view that art should be created only for its own sake -- but in the context of this essay his position takes on a quite particular colouring. For here again it is about self-determination versus external determination. Wilde wants absolute self-determination in all aspects of life: the person should work at what he wants, make art as he wants, dress as he wants -- and if one considers Wilde's life story, one would have to add: love as he wants and whom he wants. For Wilde became known not only as the author of great literature, but also for his relationship with the considerably younger Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas, for which he even spent two years in prison in 1895. For a society that had strict moral views and criminalised homosexuality, someone like Oscar Wilde was a problem. With his eccentric style of dress, his taste for excessive parties, and his homophile inclinations, Wilde was precisely that artist figure he describes in his essay. The artist who sets himself against the masses, against social conventions, and against all conformism, is above all himself.

In this sense 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' is to be considered less as a political and more as an aesthetic project. Ultimately the essay attempts to bring two great ideas together: socialism and individualism. The first idea can be explained from the historical context of the text, the second from the biographical context of the author. Reflecting on socialism as a possible alternative to capitalism is typical of an epoch in which the partly devastating consequences of early industrialisation were becoming visible. As early as 1845 Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, an important sociological study of the often catastrophic living conditions of workers in England's major cities. In the further course of the 19th century, the so-called pauperism literature flourished, depicting urbanisation and the impoverishment of the working class fictionally in order to draw attention to socioeconomic problems. A well-known example is Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

That Wilde ultimately says very little about socialism, but fills the pages instead with reflections on the artist and his public, is equally understandable when one considers his authorial biography. The unconditional will toward individualisation, toward the liberation of individual expression, runs through his literary works as much as through his personal life. Although Wilde in this instance does not succeed in really convincingly thinking individualism and socialism together -- taken separately, however, both trains of thought are quite worthwhile.