The Soul of Man under Socialism

Wilde wrote the essay in the winter of 1890–91, in the immediate aftermath of The Picture of Dorian Gray's Lippincott's Monthly publication. He had been reading Kropotkin (whom he called 'a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia'), William Morris, and Ruskin. The essay appeared in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891 under Wilde's byline, in the same issue that carried a Ruskin memoir.

The 1895 trials briefly silenced the essay's public life. In 1895, the small anarchist press Arthur Humphreys reissued it as a stand-alone pamphlet retitled The Soul of Man — Humphreys dropped 'under Socialism' from the title to make the book saleable after Wilde's disgrace. It went through four printings under that shorter title between 1895 and 1900. The original title was restored in Robert Ross's 1908 Methuen collected edition.

Wilde's socialism is not the state-planning socialism the Fabians were writing about in the same years. He explicitly rejects authoritarian government ('All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.') and imagines instead a society in which machines do necessary labour, no person is forced by hunger or property into a role they did not choose, and individualism — meaning self-development rather than competitive self-interest — becomes possible. The essay is closer in spirit to Kropotkin's mutualist anarchism than to Marx.

The first movement argues that private property creates poverty and that charity treats the symptoms while preserving the causes. 'The best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole.'

The middle section develops the connection between economic freedom and art. Wilde argues that art has always been made by people who had escaped, or been born outside, the demands of the market — a courtier, a monk, an aristocrat, a person with private means — and that under socialism the same freedom would be available to everyone. It is the essay's most disputed and most influential passage.

The final movement rejects authoritarian government and prison punishment. 'The prison-system is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would not for a moment hesitate to say that the whole prison-system is wrong. It should be altered. It should be entirely altered.' Written four years before Wilde would be sentenced to two years' hard labour and would produce De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol out of the same argument.