ABSTRACT
What Shaw’s political thought lacks in originality, it gains in terms of its representativeness. He was the multi-media, multi-faceted, multi-talented phenomenon of his times. He said so much about almost everything, he played such a multitude of parts, he was so much in earnest, a righteous jester at modernity’s court, that he managed somehow, by dint of energy and intellectual enthusiasm, to carry within himself the dilemmas and complexities which beset and characterize our age. The persona of GBS, through which Shaw’s dealings with the world were carried out, was too fantastic to be representative of anything but itself: the persona’s outpourings, however, touched the nerve ends of the human condition, tragic and magnificent in its brave mask of hope. Whatever the persona said, its master felt; whatever the master could not digest emotionally was fed into the persona’s unnatural maw. Shaw was anything but typical, yet the themes which underpin his work, the intractable tensions we find in it, are the staple diet of the twentieth century debate on modernity, morality and citizenship.
