Despite often writing about political, spiritual and philosophical matters, Lawrence was essentially contrary by nature and hated to be pigeonholed.[44] Critics such as Terry Eagleton[45] have argued that Lawrence was right-wing due to his lukewarm attitude to democracy, which he intimated would tend towards the leveling down of society and the subordination of the individual to the sensibilities of the "average" man. In his letters to Bertrand Russell around 1915, Lawrence voiced his opposition to enfranchising the working class and his hostility to the burgeoning labour movements, and disparaged the French Revolution, referring to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" as the "three-fanged serpent." Rather than a republic, Lawrence called for an absolute dictator and equivalent dictatrix to lord over the lower peoples.[46] In 1953, recalling his relationship with Lawrence in the First World War, Russell characterised Lawrence as a "proto-German Fascist," saying "I was a firm believer in democracy, whereas he had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism before the politicians had thought of it."[47] Russell felt Lawrence to be a positive force for evil.[48] However, in 1924 Lawrence wrote an epilogue to Movements in European History (a textbook he wrote, originally published in 1921) in which he denounced fascism and Soviet-style socialism as bullying and “a mere worship of Force”. Further, he declared “I believe a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government.”[49] In the late 1920s, he told his sister he would vote Labour if he was living back in England.[50] In general, though, Lawrence disliked any organized groupings, and in his essay Democracy, written in the late twenties, he argued for a new kind of democracy in which
each man shall be spontaneously himself – each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality or inequality entering in at all; and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman.[51]
Lawrence held seemingly contradictory views on feminism. The evidence of his written works, particularly his earlier novels, indicates a commitment to representing women as strong, independent, and complex; he produced major works in which young, self-directing female characters were central. In his youth he supported extending the vote to women, and he once wrote, “All women in their natures are like giantesses. They will break through everything and go on with their own lives.”[52] However, some feminist critics, notably Kate Millett, have criticised, indeed ridiculed, Lawrence's sexual politics, Millett claiming that he uses his female characters as mouthpieces to promote his creed of male supremacy and that his story The Woman Who Rode Away showed Lawrence as a pornographic sadist with its portrayal of “human sacrifice performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of the male.”[53] Brenda Maddox further highlights this story and two others written around the same time, St. Mawr and The Princess, as “masterworks of misogyny.”[54]
Despite the inconsistency and at times inscrutability of his philosophical writings, Lawrence continues to find an audience, and the publication of a new scholarly edition of his letters and writings has demonstrated the range of his achievement. Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari found in Lawrence's critique of Sigmund Freud an important precursor of anti-Oedipal accounts of the unconscious that has been much influential.[55]
