ABSTRACT
The kind of government Wells envisaged in his future state was technocratic and socialist. Given this future of the planet, he praised the Catholic Church as 'the first clearly conscious attempt to provide such a government in the world'. Wells hoped that after the war its deeper causes would be dealt with and that some sort of supranational government would be established. All the questionable claims Wells made in this passage are placed in perspective by his final analogy: world government as scientific process. But democratic forms of government met with Wells's reservations too. Both works were meant to provide a basis for more rational and planned forms of government. Wells did not envisage the encyclopaedic project as laying the groundwork for world government, but as world government itself. The encyclopaedic organisation was to be something very close to the open conspiracy or the society of samurai that he had pictured before.
