![]() ![]() Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led. ![]() But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. ![]() ![]() The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization-a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it-with a new, more highly evolved leadership. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. ![]()
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