Themes
Having and being
Wilde's central charge against private property is that it confuses a man with what he owns. It "has made gain not growth its aim", so that man forgot that "the important thing is to be". He points to English law, which punishes offences against property more severely than offences against the person, and to the rich merchant ruined by a shift in the wind. The same idea shapes his reading of Christ, who tells the wealthy young man that his personality "does not need" his possessions. Abolishing property is meant to free the rich as much as the poor.
Against all authority
Wilde's Socialism must not be Authoritarian, because "all authority is quite degrading" to those who use it and those who suffer it. He sweeps aside every form of rule: despotism, oligarchy, ochlocracy and democracy, which "means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people". Punishment brutalises a community more than crime does. In art the same argument becomes the three despots, Prince, Pope and People, with the People judged the worst. Even kindly authority, with its prizes and rewards, turns people into "petted animals" living by other people's standards.
The artist and the public
Art is "the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known", so the public's wish to control it is the essay's longest target. Wilde argues that poetry flourishes in England only because nobody reads it, while novels and plays are dragged down to popular taste. He translates the public's vocabulary: "unintelligible" means new and "immoral" means true. Journalism, now "the only estate", extends this tyranny into private lives. The remedy is receptivity, the spectator as "the violin on which the master is to play", which Irving created in his audiences at the Lyceum.
Christ and self-realisation
Wilde reads Christ as a teacher of Individualism whose message was "Be yourself". He cites the rich young man, the woman who poured perfume on Christ's hair, and "Let the dead bury the dead" as proof that Christ allowed no claim to be made on personality. A Christlike life can be lived by Father Damien among the lepers, or by Wagner and Shelley in their art. Yet Christ offered a perfection reached through pain or solitude, the ideal of medieval art. Wilde looks forward to a new Individualism that will be reached through joy instead.
Utopia and changing human nature
Wilde meets the charge of impracticality head on. "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at", he writes, because Utopia is the country where Humanity is always landing. His Utopia is concrete: machines will clean the streets and stoke steamers while people enjoy cultivated leisure. When critics say the scheme goes against human nature, he agrees, and replies that the only thing known about human nature is that it changes. Louis XIV thought it would stay the same, and the result was the French Revolution.