Appeal of Socialism

In the abstract, why has socialism been so appealing to so many people over the last 150 years?
This is not in his rather beautiful essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but Oscar Wilde does say somewhere that a map of the world that doesn't have a Utopia on it isn't worth glancing at. And I don’t in fact think that that's true. And I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Utopianism was a word we used rather in disparagement. But, there is in human beings an ability to see beyond existing conditions or to always ask why they are the way that they are and to conclude that it's not because of God or nature that some people are rich and some are poor. Some are free and some are not. And believe these are very substantially manmade conditions and can be man-unmade. And, the idea therefore that the market is smarter than you is something that very many intellectual types won't accept. It can't just be that we are the objects of a blind process. So there's a will to do this, a reaction to manmade injustice. And a refusal to be consoled by the eternal argents, most of them preceding from religion that well, that's just the way things are or that's the way that human nature is.