A Critical Examination of Socialism

A Critical Examination of Socialism is a classic political science text and a fascinating volume of political writing by William Hurrell Mallock. When socialism, as thus defined, is spoken of as a thing that exists--as a thing that has risen and is spreading--two ideas are apt to suggest themselves to the minds of all parties equally, of which one coincides with facts, while the other does not, having, indeed, thus far at all events, no appreciable connection with them; and it is necessary to get rid of the false idea, and concern ourselves only with the true. William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 1849 - 2 April 1923) was an English novelist and economics writer. He published several works on economics, directed against radical and socialist theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labor and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses (1896), Aristocracy and Evolution (1898), and A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908) - and later visited the United States in order to deliver a series of lectures on the subject: The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out - whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures, substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Among his anti-socialist works should be classed his novel, The Old Order Changes (1886). His other novels are A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), A Human Document (1892), The Heart of Life (1895), Tristram Lacy (1899), The Veil of the Temple (1904), and An Immortal Soul (1908).