“This moral monster state”: Modern Utopianism, Emergent Order, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
Long considered an allegory about the depredations of Western imperialism, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) can also be understood as a fable about the deleterious effects of advanced industrial capitalism. Wells associates the invading Martians with exploitative “vampiric” capitalists. Inventors of technologically sophisticated industrial and war machines, the Martians work twenty-four hours a day, pausing only to feed on the blood of their earthly subjects. Suggestively, Wells borrows Adam Smith’s famous phrase to describe the destructive Martian Heat-Ray as “an invisible hand.” Curiously, however, the alien invaders share a collective consciousness (via telepathy), and thus can also be figured as ruthless authoritarian central planners of a dystopian socialist workers’ state that evolved out of a prior capitalist phase of economic history. The fantastic invasion of the Martians ultimately ends in disaster: they succumb to earthly bacteria against which they have developed no natural immunity. The stunning conclusion of the novel reveals a profound tension within Wells’s thought: as a utopian socialist (Wells became a Fabian in 1903), he endorses a fully “rational” centrally planned top-down order, but as a follower of Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Wells also affirms the power of an evolutionary (emergent) order to disrupt rationally designed social organizations; such spontaneous orders paradoxically prove the more influential and potentially the more beneficial shaper of the human future. Drawing on Wells’s early non-fiction utopian works, Anticipations (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), the economic writings of Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, and Vernon Smith, and the scientific works of Darwin, as well as the literary criticism of Paul Cantor, this essay explores Wells’s contradictory representations of capitalism and socialism, with a particular focus on the problem of emergent order and the dangers of what Hayek calls “the fatal conceit” of scientistic or constructivist central planning.
