Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion

In The Revolutionist's Handbook, George Bernard Shaw launches a biting assault on complacent politics, moral cant, and the comforting myths of progress. Speaking through John Tanner, he argues that real social change depends not on institutions, slogans, or sentimental reform, but on deliberate human intention—and on the creation of a better kind of person. The chapter "On Good Breeding" makes this case with provocative wit, insisting that the future belongs to conscious selection, not abstract virtue, and that property, marriage, and conventional mating habits all stand in the way of human improvement. Shaw treats marriage as a mutable social contract, separating domestic companionship from sexual reproduction and imagining forms of equality that would free both. He dismisses prudery as a product of poverty, ignorance, and hypocrisy, and he challenges the idea that reform alone can perfect humanity, arguing that power, coercion, and hard realities often drive change more than idealism. Yet he also rejects political violence as a cure, warning that terror can replace one injustice with another. From the Oneida experiment to democracy's failures, Shaw presents the Superman as both a social ideal and a political necessity. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.