George Watson on an early critique of socialism

In 1901, Max Hirsch (1852-1909), a Prussian disciple of Henry George who in 1890 settled in Australia, completed an extensive book called Democracy versus Socialism which he believed to be the first comprehensive refutation of socialism ever published.  A radical himself, he saw socialism as the road to slavery, promising only 'an all-pervading despotism' by a new managerial class.  That was nearly half a century before George Orwell's Animal Farm.  But Hirsch's preface, characteristically, holds out no realistic hope that his warning against tyranny will be heeded.  That is because socialists cannot listen.  Confident in their conviction that social reform can only mean socialism, they are 'deaf.'  It is a book which, appearing in the first year of the twentieth century, sums up an age to come.  Anti-socialists do not quote it; Orwell and Koestler, a generation on, do not appear to have known of its existence.  It is a warning unheard.

~ George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialsm (1998), pp. 16-17