With Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia, Matthew Yde provides an overdue look at the more perplexing aspects of Shaw's political thought. He makes a solid case for admitting Shaw to the club of utopian writers from which he is typically excluded and takes seriously the author's self-positioning as a revolutionary. But whereas the vast majority of scholars ignore or dismiss Shaw's support for the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, Yde takes this seriously as well, insisting that we will do ourselves and the “iconoclast” playwright a “disservice” if we fail to recognize “the totalitarian side of his work and personality” (9). Thus, following in the footsteps of Kimberly Jannarone, whose important work Artaud and His Doubles (Michigan, 2010) sets out to explore what Susan Sontag called the “fascist longings in our midst,” Yde tackles Shaw and what we think we know of his political thought.

Yde's premises are straightforward: it was Shaw's “deep need to believe” (145) in a coming utopia that led him to Fabian socialism and to support the Communist, Fascist, and Nazi dictatorships. His revulsion for waste, need for order, and disdain for the supposedly undisciplined proletarian masses caused him to identify with the Nietzschean supermen Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler and to defend their right to eliminate undesirables from the body politic. Accordingly, Yde's analyses of two essays and eight plays focus on the themes of Creative Evolution and the Superman, eugenics, and how these were joined in Shaw's quest for utopia. Yde rightly asks: Why would Shaw talk so often about these issues if he did not care about or believe in them? The strength of Yde's study lies in this question, and his readings lend complexity (and seriousness) to Shaw's plays. But, more important, the many uncomfortable questions Yde asks—and Shaw's callous disregard for victims of political violence and The Holocaust—must indeed be reckoned with if we really want to know Bernard Shaw.

As detailed and finely teased out as Yde's readings are, his focus on these themes becomes repetitive, certainly in part because his strategy for responding to decades of avoidance is to bombard with examples. The redundancy, however, also points to a shortcoming of the study: the eye that fixes itself so critically on Shaw's plays averts its gaze from totalitarianism, which is presented and understood throughout the book in only superficial terms. Stalin's, Hitler's, and Mussolini's regimes become a generic axis of evil whose parts had “merely superficial” ideological differences but were united by their dictatorial structures and death camps (16). Although Yde notes that Shaw's political views are as important as his psychology, in the end his analysis is thoroughly grounded in Shaw's troubled psyche, as when he stresses that the writer's “unstructured, anarchical, and unhappy childhood” explained his “desire for an ordered and hierarchical political ‘household’” (159). It may be that Shaw's sorrows led him to idealize the dictators and their methods; but, if this is the case, Yde weakens his own argument that Shaw was a “keen political observer” (166), political protagonist, or revolutionary, as Yde instead unveils a brilliant man who became a puppet to the unconscious mind. This conclusion, perhaps, does as much a disservice to Shaw and to our understanding of twentieth-century mass politics as ignoring the issue does.

Yde's attention to the aforementioned themes in Shaw's work is perfectly valid, as is the choice to do a psycholiterary study of a given playwright. And yet one cannot help but be disappointed that, even after Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism, the research on Shaw's relationship with the dictators and their regimes has yet to be done, especially when the author stresses the need for “detailed historical contextualization” (203). In addition to Shaw's publications, Yde relies on English-language literary criticism, a curious choice given that, as he points out, most of that scholarship avoids the issues he takes up. But a historian's materials and approach, as well as a multilingual bibliography, would have brought more specific, political questions into the light. To take just Italy as an example, Yde discusses Shaw's well-known debate with socialist exile Gaetano Salvemini, but archival and other primary sources offer lesser and even unknown evidence to ponder: Shaw's relationship with Margherita Sarfatti, Il Duce's paramour; his frequenting of a Fascist official during his visits to Stresa; his flattering imitation of and commentary on Mussolini in an early sound film; his audience with the dictator; his ongoing correspondence with the theatrical censorship office; his refusal to be exempted from the Fascists' ban on British plays after the Ethiopia sanctions debacle; Mussolini's and other Fascists' enthusiastic response to his works. A generalized idea of an Italian Fascism that envisioned a new race of socially equal men and implemented death camps in order to bring it about is neither complete nor accurate enough to explain Shaw's support for Mussolini. Investigating the playwright's behavior in the above situations would have required exploring the reality of Fascist governance—and Shaw's responses to it—revealing Shaw as a political thinker and agent.

Stressing that Shaw was utopian to the end, Yde merely skirts the evolution of his thought over time, the ambivalence of his depiction of the dictators in his satire Geneva, his increasing tendency to identify as Communist over the years, and even his rethinking of dictatorship itself in the 1944 treatise Everybody's Political What's What? Yde privileges the unchanging psyche, sidelining the historical and political in deference to that psychological reading which—and on this I want to be clear—reveals much about Shaw but too little about the political systems he championed. Yde in fact closes his epilogue on Shaw and other Anglophone writers drawn to totalitarianism with a citation from Melville that highlights madness: a conventional move that lands Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism in the realm of those studies that set aside twentieth-century dictatorships as inexplicable Others. With the aid of Bernard Shaw, perhaps we had the opportunity to learn something more.