Publication details
The Reluctant Advocate : Political Essays of E.M. Forster
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The aim of this paper is to offer a cross section of the 1930s and 1940s political essays of E.M. Forster and to situate them within the wider body of literature on the topic produced by his contemporaries. Though decisevely anti-Nazi, Forster was an advocate of far subtler solutions for the immanent threat and the subsequent disaster of the Second World War, unlike many intellectuals who offered quite radical individual ideas at this time or believed in what the historian Jay Winter terms ‘major utopias’. Indeed, although Forster suggests democracy is the road to take, he describes it as merely ‘less hateful than other contemporary forms of government’ and goes on to give it two cheers only - ‘one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.’ In that democracy, war is the manifestation of force, and civilisation that which happens in the intervals; only Love with the capital L is worthy of the final hurrah. But, as love cannot happen in the abstract, between people who never met, Forster suggests that what we are left with is tolerance. |
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