Abstract Oscar Wilde's essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” which first appeared in Frank Harris's Fortnightly Review in 1891, has always proved difficult to place on the fin-de-siècle political map. Over the years, scholars have reached contending viewpoints about the degree to which Wilde's discussion either articulates a convincing commitment to socialism or serves as a series of memorable aphorisms that were aimed simply to humor the readership of a liberal-minded periodical. This essay shows that the most intractable aspect of Wilde's oftentimes aphoristic assertions about the need for a postcapitalist society liberated from private property is his insistence on “Individualism”: a form of personal freedom that he believes is most strongly evident in forward-thinking artworks produced by individuals who were frequently condemned as immoral. Wilde elevates this aesthetic ideal of “Individualism” in relation to the most admirable component of ancient Greek society and the exemplary spirit of Jesus Christ. Here, one sees that Wilde wrested the highly charged term “Individualism” from, on the one hand, socialist intellectuals who despised its emphasis on self-interestedness and, on the other hand, reactionaries who championed it as the cornerstone of society based in property ownership. Later retitled as The Soul of Man, Wilde's essay maintained special importance for him in his reflections on the two-year jail sentence that he elaborated in the long prison memoir known as De Profundis. Even though Wilde's essay had little impact in Britain prior to his death in late 1900, during the first decade of the twentieth century The Soul of Man grabbed the attention of many different socialist groups through the West. Its influence was eventually so great that in 1905 the Social Democratic Federation newspaper Justice acknowledged that The Soul of Man proposed a “very advanced” form of socialism that warranted comparison with the recent writings of the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky.
Joseph Bristow (Tue,) studied this question.