James seems to believe that Henry George was an advocate of socialism. I don't know if he is familiar with The Science of Political Economy published posthumously in 1898. They say "politics makes strange bedfellows" and it is certainly true that many of the socialist persuasion supported George in his two races for mayor of N.Y. But in Chapter VII entitled Ineffectual Gropings he made clear his disdain for Marxism and socialism. In the Science of Political Economy George is critical of virtually all the schools of economic thought he was aware of at the time including the Austrian which he called a "pseudo-science" and "if it has any principles, I have been utterly unable to find them." See Chapter VIII entitled The Scholastic Breakdown. Actually, the whole text of some 528 pp should be studied by anyone who is interested in more than a superficial critique of his views. Incidentally, I believe Marx somewhere referred to George's economic analysis as "the capitalists last ditch." Under the name of socialism, a name which all such movements have now succeeded in appropriating, all such plans are embraced. We sometimes hear of "scientific socialism," as something to be established, as it were, by proclamation, or by act of government. In this there is a tendency to confuse the idea of science with that of something purely conventional or political, a scheme or proposal, not a science. For science, as previously explained, is concerned with natural laws, not with the proposal of man -- with relations which always have existed and always must exist. Socialism takes no account of natural laws, neither seeking them nor striving to be governed by them. It is an art or conventional scheme like any other scheme in politics or government, while political economy is an exposition of certain invariable laws of human nature. The proposal which socialism makes is that the collectivity or state shall assume the management of all means of production, including land, capital and man himself; do away with all competition, and convert mankind into two classes, the directors, taking their orders from government and acting by governmental authority, and the workers, for whom everything shall be provided, including the directors themselves. It is a proposal to bring back mankind to the socialism of Peru, but without reliance on divine will or power. Modern socialism is in fact without religion, and its tendency is atheistic. It is more destitute of any central and guiding principle than any philosophy I know of. Mankind is here; how, it does not state; and must proceed to make a world for itself, as disorderly as that which Alice in Wonderland confronted. It has no system of individual rights whereby it can define the extent to which the individual is entitled to liberty or to which the state may go in restraining it. And so long as no individual has any principle of guidance it is impossible that society itself should have any. How such a combination could be called a science, and how it should get a following, can be accounted for only by the "fatal facility of writing without thinking," which the learned German ability of studying details without any leading principle permits to pass, and by the number of places which such a bureaucratic organization would provide. However, through government repression and its falling in with trade-union notions it has made great headway in Germany, and has taken considerable hold in England. Roy Davidson