H. G. Wells saw scientific socialism as synonymous with denying chance and spontaneous order

Evidence

English liberal, socialist, and gallant fighter against narrow nationalism, religion, and everything which smacked of a prescientific age - H. G. Wells - pondered throughout his long life and relentlessly preached to his numerous avid readers (“I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much” - testified George Orwell on Wells’ impact on the minds of the English educated classes) the urgency of “replacing disorder by order” and of placing scientifically informed, planning agencies at the control desk of social development (see Wells, 1984). To Wells, the crowning argument in favor of a planned, socialist society was its affinity (indeed, synonymity) with recognition of the fundamental idea on which all true science is founded: “the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happenings constitute the only possible methods by which things may be done in the world.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 408

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the aesthetic/planning roots of genocide in respectable 20th-century socialism — a counterpoint to the usual fascist-only narrative.
• XREF: Echoes the garden metaphor in Bauman’s ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’ and the totalizing planner societies in Zamyatin’s ‘We’ — genuinely cross-domain resonance with the guard’s library’s We.