Slow Politics: H. G. Wells, Reform, and the Idea of the Welfare State

Abstract

Abstract:This essay homes in on a set of neglected political and literary debates about institutional reform and the (emerging) welfare state around 1900. In doing so, I reclaim a reformist idiom that is both more ethically substantive and more politically ambitious than the languages of reform currently available to critics on the Left. Taking up Tony Judt’s provocative assertion that current defenses of the welfare state on the left are marred by a profound “discursive disability” (Ill Fares the Land 34), I reconstruct an important part of the history of the reformist literary mode by turning to the Edwardian works of H. G. Wells.