The New World Order: The Book and Its Model of World Authority

In January 1940, only a few months after the Second World War began in Europe, H. G. Wells published the short political book The New World Order. Its subtitle asks whether such an order is attainable, how it might be attained, and what kind of world a world at peace would have to be. Wells's answer is far more ambitious than ordinary interstate cooperation: he considers a global political order that would move beyond the sovereignty of competing nation-states.

The core of the book connects three things that Wells treats as interdependent: economic collectivization or socialism on a world scale, universal law backed by a declaration of personal rights, and very broad freedom of speech, criticism and education. His model is therefore both a project for stronger supranational authority and an attempt to constrain that authority through individual rights.

This article is an exposition of Wells's specific 1940 book. The phrase 'The New World Order' here does not serve as a generic label for every later use of the same words, and the title by itself proves no hidden historical continuity or conspiracy. We distinguish what Wells actually proposes from the historical context in which he wrote and from later reception of his ideas.

Special attention is given to a tension created by the book itself: Wells wants to remove the dangers of unlimited state sovereignty, yet he proposes institutions with very broad global reach in order to do so. A faithful reading therefore has to see both his desire for world authority and the safeguards he proposes against arbitrary power.

Which book is The New World Order?

The bibliographic anchor for this article is the first London edition published by Secker & Warburg in January 1940. The Morgan Library records 190 pages plus two unnumbered pages, while Open Library catalogs the same London edition as a 190-page volume. The digital primary text used for the content audit preserves twelve chapters, from The End of an Age to World Order in Being. The bibliographic identity is therefore resolved: the article does not mix the first edition with American, later or abridged reprints.

The book was written during wartime as a political program, not as a novel or a coded prophecy. Wells tries to derive an institutional answer to the problem of peace from the experience of war, economic crisis and national rivalry. The title therefore has to be read inside his own argument. The article does not treat verbal similarity between Wells's terminology and later political slogans as evidence of the same plan, the same actors or an uninterrupted project.

From sovereign states to a world political order

Wells begins from the belief that technology and warfare have reduced the practical importance of geographical distance while the world remains divided into states claiming final sovereignty for themselves. In his view that combination is dangerous: increasingly powerful means of destruction remain inside a system in which states can invoke their own interests and no effective common political authority stands above them. He therefore concludes that durable peace cannot be achieved through diplomacy among otherwise unchanged sovereign states alone.

His alternative is the gradual merging of political boundaries into a wider World Pax. This is not merely a league of states retaining every classical sovereign power. Wells envisages a deeper federation and repeatedly speaks in terms of a single world-state framework. Modern scholarship appropriately places this within his long-running 'world state' project. It is Wells's normative political program, not a historical fact that such an arrangement is inevitable or the only possible route to peace.

Federation is not enough: Wells's world socialism

Political federation is only half of the solution for Wells. He argues that common political authority would fail if economic life remained divided among competing private and national centers of power. He therefore explicitly advocates collectivization of key economic functions and uses the language of world socialism. In his model, production, infrastructure and basic material needs would increasingly be coordinated as parts of a common global system.

It is important not to treat Wells's use of socialism as automatically identical to every later socialist state or to the Soviet model. The book is sharply critical of Bolshevik practice and argues that collectivization without legal protection of the individual and without freedom of criticism is dangerous and incomplete. His own ideal therefore combines collective economic administration, legal protection of personality and open public reason. Whether those elements can be made institutionally stable is a separate political question.

A 'new type of revolution': changing ideas rather than a coup

The chapter titled The New Type of Revolution can easily be misread because of its title. Wells does not call for a classic secret coup or an uncontrolled mass uprising. On the contrary, he treats such methods as ineffective and dangerous. He wants revolution redirected toward an open transformation of political ideas, education, organization and social expectations that would gradually make the old order unworkable or obsolete.

He condenses his program into three linked pillars: scientifically planned world socialism, law that more strongly protects personal rights, and the broadest possible freedom of speech, criticism, publication and education. This triad matters because it shows that Wells does not present centralization as an end in itself. He wants greater capacity for global coordination, but at the same time insists that the new authority must remain exposed to public scrutiny and constrained by individual rights.

A declaration of rights as a defense against the new authority

Wells recognizes a problem created by his own proposal: a more universal and penetrating collective order could also mean more universal and penetrating power over the individual. Chapter X is therefore devoted to a Declaration of the Rights of Man. He places the declaration in a Western tradition of charters and rights declarations and argues that it should become fundamental law for all communities assembled within a future World Pax.

His draft includes civil and social rights: personal security, food, medical care, education, freedom of discussion, association and worship, and access to work. Wells's human-rights campaign is a historically important part of the broader prewar and wartime movement toward international codification of rights. Modern scholarship treats it as one precursor to the later Universal Declaration of Human Rights while stressing that the process was collaborative, international and negotiated; The article therefore does not credit Wells with sole authorship of the UDHR.

How was the world order supposed to work?

In the closing chapters Wells moves beyond general principles. He envisages changes to money and finance in which major economic operations would increasingly take place within a collective world system. He also discusses disarmament and an international policing force able to prevent renewed armament and enforce common rules. Science, research and education would expand substantially because he sees them as infrastructure for a more rational global society.

At the same time, he rejects the idea of a fully finished utopian blueprint imposed by one group on everybody else. World order is described as a process built by many people and institutions rather than by a single leader. That emphasis does not erase the centralizing implications of his model: world law, a common security structure and collectivized economic administration would have very broad reach. It does show that Wells does not present his proposal as a personal dictatorship or a secret hierarchy.

The central tension: global power and personal freedom

The book's most important institutional problem can be stated without deciding it for the reader. Wells believes that unlimited state sovereignty can produce war, economic rivalry and paralysis in dealing with shared problems. He therefore wants powers shifted upward to a world level. Yet the more authority such a level acquires, the more important it becomes to ask who supervises its administrators, how people can peacefully contest its decisions, and what happens if the system abuses its concentrated power.

Wells's answer is law, public criticism, education and declared personal rights. A critical reader can still ask whether those safeguards are sufficient for institutions of such scale; a supporter can emphasize that Wells places rights at the center precisely because he recognizes the danger. The article does not resolve that dispute. The essential point is that the book should be reduced neither to a simple manifesto for total centralization nor to a simple liberal project: global coordination and personal liberty are deliberately placed side by side.

Reception, Orwell and the book's historical place

Wells's world-state project attracted sharp criticism during the war itself. In the 1941 essay Wells, Hitler and the World State, George Orwell argued that Wells underestimated the political force of nationalism, religious attachment, loyalty and other non-rational or pre-liberal forces. Orwell's objection was not that Wells lacked a clear destination, but that a convincing political mechanism from the existing world to that destination was missing. This is an example of early reception and remains analytically separate from the primary text of the book.

Historically, The New World Order belongs to a wider late-1930s and 1940s debate about federalism, globalism, international law and human rights. Some ideas from that environment later acquired institutional relatives, but resemblance is not evidence of a direct causal chain. The most faithful conclusion is narrower: in 1940 Wells publicly and explicitly proposed a world political order, economic collectivization and universal law protecting personal rights; his book should be assessed as a document of that specific program and historical moment.

Sources and further reading

1. H. G. Wells, The New World Order — first London edition, Secker & Warburg, January 1940 — Morgan Library bibliographic record
2. H. G. Wells, The New World Order — digital primary text, Project Gutenberg Australia
3. Open Library — The New World Order, Secker & Warburg, London, 1940, 190 p., LCCN 40006125
4. W. R. Inge — The New World Order, contemporary review, Nature 145 (13 January 1940)
5. Nature — Civilization and the Rights of Man, 17 February 1940
6. Maxim Shadurski — Wells and the World State, The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells (2026)
7. Emma Planinc — Wells and Human Rights, The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells (2026)
8. A. W. Brian Simpson — The Ideological Response to War: Codes of Human Rights, Human Rights and the End of Empire (2004)
9. Review of International Studies — George Orwell on politics and war; discussion of Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
10. Or Rosenboim — The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950