The Rights of Man E-Book

H G Wells

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In 1940 the Second World War continued to rage, and atrocities wreaked around the globe made international waves. Wells, a socialist and prominent political thinker as well as a first-rate novelist, set down in The Rights of Man a stirring manifesto, designed to instruct the international community on how best to safeguard human rights.  The work gained traction, and was soon under discussion for becoming actual legislation. Although Wells didn't live to see it enacted, his words laid the groundwork for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined human rights in law for the first time, and was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, changing the course of history for ever and granting fundamental rights to billions.

Leseprobe

The Rights of ManorWhat Are We Fighting For?

h.g. wells

with an introduction by

burhan sönmez

President of

PEN International

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

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The Rights of Man first published in 1940

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2022

Edited text and notes © Renard Press Ltd, 2022

Introduction © Burhan Sönmez, 2022

Cover design by Will Dady

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contents

Introduction

Preface

The Rights Of Man, or, What Are We Fighting For?

i. Imperative Need For a Declaration

ii. Security from Violence

iii. Habeas Corpus

iv. Democratic Law

v. The New Tyranny of the Dossier

vi. The Right to Subsistence

vii. The Right to Work and to Have Possessions

viii. Free Market and Profit-Seeking

ix. The Revised Declaration

x. A French Parallel

xi. An Alternative Draft and Some Further Suggestions

xii. The New Map of the World

xiii. A Book for Which the World Is Waiting

Notes

introduction

He Told Us So

Published about one hundred and fifty years after Thomas Paine’s ground-breaking work Rights of Man, H.G. Wells’ essay shared its name, but addressed a very different world. In his approach, Wells was much more direct, declaring a desire to establish a new world system in contradiction of every government, including the current British government. The first step towards achieving this new world system was to set out a framework ensuring that all citizens of the world had the same rights, and in The Rights of Man he set down the foundations of this framework.

He was pondering these matters at the age of seventy-four, when he was a respected author who had published more books than anyone could count, and he had witnessed many upheavals, including the two world wars.

Today, the identity of the ‘intellectual’ seems to have lost its former power. ‘Intellectual’ was used to describe someone who was not only a cultured person, an artist or academic, but someone in the creative arts or the world of thought who took an active interest in social matters. Wells was one of the best examples of his generation. Alongside his writing – including his wildly popular novels such as The War of the Worlds and non-fiction works like The Outline of History – he strived towards the betterment of society and the happiness of ordinary people. It was not enough for him to be successful in his own work and to become a kind of expert in his field, contrary to the prevalent attitudes of today. For the intellectual, the world was a whole, and he was an integral part of it.

This ideology greatly affected the way Wells wrote and lived, and had its roots in his childhood. When he was eight years old, he was bedridden due to a broken leg, and his father carried him books from the library to pass the time. The books allowed Wells to escape out into the world from his bed, so it is perhaps not surprising that his novels were full of dreams – dreams of a time machine, invisibility, alien invasion. However, while the images he created were science fiction, he also employed an extreme form of realism. That is, he was committed to the era he lived in, and he weaved social criticism and observation into his fiction; his novels were, therefore, both realistic and utopian. It was in this way, from an early age, that he became the most famous writer of his time.

The Rights of Man should not be seen as a text written by an elderly writer who was nearing the end of his life, full of anxiety caused by World War II, trying to give advice to humanity. No, this book was the natural continuation of Wells’ orderly and coherent world of thought, which spanned his lifetime. It follows most closely The War That Will End War,* written twenty-six years previously, at the beginning of the First World War, in which Wells expressed his desire to contribute directly to the reform of the world, to develop art and politics, creative writing and social writing together.

Art is involved in life indirectly, not directly. It expresses itself in a language that resembles another dimension, set apart from other disciplines and everyday language. In seeking to shake off the time-honoured structures of language, the artist looks for ways to have an impact on others. Alongside his novels, Wells also wrote a great many non-fiction books, which came from a desire to play with the rhythm of everyday life. And he was able to do just that.

In the first half of the twentieth century new forms of writing were emerging. In this period, which could be called the Age of Manifestos, writers tried to solve the problems of the world, to explore art and philosophy concepts that spanned the ages, through short texts. In what was perhaps one of the earliest examples of this trend, Leo Tolstoy attempted to condense the Gospels into a short handbook named The Gospel in Brief; Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to answer the problems of three thousand years of philosophy in a seventy-page book, Tractatus; and myriad writers published documents of only a few pages in length, manifestos such as Manifesto of Futurism and Surrealist Manifesto, which aimed to define the future of art and humanity. All of these writers attempted to reform the world through short-form texts.

The ten-paragraph declaration Wells wrote, setting down rules that would enable people to live in harmony and equality, can be seen as a reflection of this writing form: an intention to solve big issues with comparatively few words. Other declarations of the rights of man prepared by the Cambridge Peace Aims Group and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in France were similar in form.

The brevity of the text should not be considered a weakness, but rather a representation of its simplicity and intensity. As a matter of fact, within a decade it inspired important socio-political structures such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,* adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and the European Convention on Human Rights, prepared by the Council of Europe in 1950.

Men were problematic; Wells knew this to be true in both the past and the present, because in the plural men formed governments, started wars, oppressed one another. On the other hand, Wells, who believed in the good of the individual man, envisioned a future based on collectivism and common values, allowing this goodness to spread throughout the world. In a society filled with corrupt systems, men were also corrupted; so a new worldview was needed – one that would secure man’s rights and bring about a new system that would uphold common values. Otherwise no war would be ‘the war to end war’.

In a conversation with his friends just before he died in 1778, in response to someone saying ‘Men are wicked’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is credited as saying, ‘Men may be wicked, but man is good’. The singular good versus the plural evil expressed here struck a chord with Wells, who clearly thought this to be the key to a better future.

Liberation was only possible through revolution – not a revolution of barricades and destruction, but rather one of steady progress. Wells’ conception of progress – though too much tied to the word Revolution – was that of Fabian socialists, patiently and stubbornly developing, rather than a French-style revolution. It was based on the gradual realisation of social developments; but he wanted the success of this to be brought about through voluntary interventions and persistent effort. It is clear from the line, ‘We have to get rid of and replace all these governments by a world system,’ that he understood the necessity of bodies like the United Nations and texts such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights before anyone else.

When Catherine Amy Dawson Scott set up PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) in London in 1921 to ensure the dialogue between and solidarity with writers around the world, Wells was one of the first to join. At a time when the First World War was still choking societies, PEN, now the world’s oldest human rights organisation, believed in fostering relationships and initiatives across borders, and considered art and literature to pave the way for such relationships.

PEN International’s charter, which went on to inspire international human rights texts, expressed principles that were implicit amongst the membership in the early 1920s. The first three articles, written by the Nobel Prize-winning author John Galsworthy after the tense Berlin Congress in 1926, were approved at the Brussels Congress the following year. These articles embodied the universal human values that Wells believed in.

PEN affirms that:

Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.In all circumstances, particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.Members of PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favour of good understanding and mutual respect between nations and people; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality in one world.

This expression, ‘the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality in one world’, which resembles a utopian dream, required serious effort to commit to, and it was Wells, elected president after John Galsworthy, who took the most concrete step in this regard and placed PEN International on a new course. In a debate with the German PEN delegates at the Dubrovnik Congress in 1933, against the background of the brewing Nazi Party storm, Wells defended the right of the Jewish writer Ernst Toller to speak on behalf of the writers expelled from the German PEN centre. As a result, the German delegates left the hall and broke away from PEN International, and PEN moved beyond being simply a union supporting literature and people of letters towards being a universal organisation of writers based on the concept of freedom of expression. At this crucial juncture, it was Wells that paved the way, with his determination and foresight. He knew the dangers of Nazism, its sights set on the freedom of expression; his own books were banned in Germany, and had been burned at the Opernplatz in Berlin. It was not enough for writers to wish one another well, he realised, but to strive towards affecting real change.

After his three-year presidency (1933–36), Wells joined PEN International’s Wartime International PresidentialCommittee (1941–47), when the extraordinary circumstances of World War II meant that the organisation had a five-member committee rather than one president. At the same time as The Rights of Man was published and hotly discussed internationally, PEN was developing its charter, which was eventually ratified it in its final form at the 1948 Congress. Wells was one of the great minds behind the charter, providing material that determined the basic principles of PEN International, as well as the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

PEN International, which has more than 140 centres in more than a hundred countries, has been led by writers such as E.M. Forster, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll and Mario Vargas Llosa, and on the foundation of three great names – Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells – has now been in operation for a century.

Today, PEN works under difficult conditions to promote literature and defend freedom of expression. Our world, sadly, is not a safer place than the one in which Wells lived. Helping writers in Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain was as essential then as it is now to support those in Afghanistan, Turkey, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, Myanmar, Eritrea, Uganda and so on. The world is at a crossroads again, as new forms of destruction – hate crime, surveillance, the climate crisis – suffuse across the globe. As populist regimes spread like a virus, the rights of people are always the first target.

In Wells’ view, declarations such as Magna Carta in 1215, the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and various other texts determining the rights of the citizens against those in power were not fit for purpose given the ‘increasing complexity of the new social structure’. He believed he found himself at a great turning point in human history – just as we are at a turning point today. As Wells argued, it is still possible to get rid of all fears – the fear of hunger, the fear of war, the fear of oppression – by establishing people’s rights and encouraging the defence of them.

Wells was not only analysing the problems of his day in depth; he also had his gaze fixed on the distant future, and was trying to redraw the map of the future of humanity. ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,’ Oscar Wilde said. Wells clearly agreed, and tried to establish utopias, aiming to improve the happiness of humanity, in all he did, throughout his life.

But Utopia belongs in an unknown, distant time – a distance both temporal and spatial. What Wells was trying to do was to bring about Utopia in the current moment; in his eyes, it was not ‘the place that cannot exist’, it was ‘the place that should be made to exist’.

Wells doesn’t have a grave or tombstone; as he dreamed of being a citizen of the world, his ashes were spread over the seas, heading towards other continents, to intermingle with the water and soil everywhere – but he stated that his epitaph should be, ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’

Nearly eighty years after his death, we are still reading his words, trying to perpetuate his principles, and we know very well that he told us so.

burhan sönmez

President of PEN International

Cambridge, April 2022

preface

§1

In this compact booklet, it is proposed to tell the story of a manifesto which its authors believe could be made a very useful and important document at the present time. It is a piece of associated writing of which the present writer is to be regarded as the editor and secretary rather than the author, and it first took shape in the form of two letters to the London Times. Therein we have the first statement of an idea that has developed in substance and importance with the impact of other experienced and critical minds. We believe that to many readers this gradual crystallisation step by step of a definite politico-social creed may prove much more stimulating and interesting than the mere formal statement of the creed. To them this book is dedicated.

The original Times letter ran as follows.

WAR aimsTHE NEED FOR LIMITLESS CANDOUR

To the Editor,

The Times

sir,

I have been following the correspondence upon War Aims in your columns with considerable attention. In many respects it recalls the War Aims Controversy of 1917–18 when the Crewe House organisation did its unsuccessful best to extract from the Foreign Office a precise statement of what the country was fighting for (see Sir Campbell Stuart’s Secrets of Crewe House).*No such statement was ever produced, and the Great War came to a ragged end in mutual accusations of broken promises and double crossing.

Even then there was a worldwide feeling that a great revolution in human affairs was imminent; the phrase ‘a war to end war’* expressed that widely diffused feeling, and surely there could be no profounder break with human tradition and existing forms of government than that. But that revolution did not realise itself. The League of Nations,* we can all admit now, was a poor and ineffective outcome of that revolutionary proposal to banish armed conflict from the world and inaugurate a new life for mankind. It was too conservative of existing things, half-hearted, diplomatic. And since, as more and more of us are beginning to realise now, there can be no more peace or safety on earth without a profound reconstruction of the methods of human living, the Great War did not so much come to an end as smoulder through two decades, the fatuous twenties and the frightened thirties, to flare up again now. Now at a level of greater tension, increased violence and destructiveness and more universal suffering, we are back to something very like 1914, and the decisive question before our species is whether this time it will set its face resolutely towards that drastic remoulding of ideas and relationships, that world revolution, which it has shirked for a quarter of a century.

If that revolution is to be brought off successfully and give a renewed lease to human happiness and effort, it is to be brought off only by the fullest, most ruthless discussion of every aspect and possibility of the present situation. Nobody and no group of people knows enough for this immense reorganisation, and unless we can have a full and fearless public intercourse of minds open to all the world, our present enemies included, we shall never be able to establish a guiding system of ideas upon which a new world order can rest.

We have before us as an object lesson the great experiment of Russia. Whatever anyone may think of the outcome of the socialist movement which found its main embodiment in communism after 1848,* there can be little dispute now of the fundamental nobility of that conception of a worldwide international system of social justice, a world peace, from which the incentive of private profit was to be eliminated. But from the beginning this movement encountered repression. It could not say what it had to say plainly and fearlessly. It was universalism with an involuntary hole-and-corner flavour.*

The result of suppressing the full, free discussion of revolutionary proposals, even of the extremest revolutionary proposals, is to force them underground. This sort of thing does not save an outworn and decaying regime, but it drives the critics who are discussing a new order to conspiratorial methods, to terroristic secrecy, to unventilated dogmatism.