They lived in a rarified intellectual circle where as the chosen elites, they could smoke their pipes and stroke their chins, and actually believe that the "little people" would somehow be better off, with the enlightened overlords telling them what to do.
Not that different from today's liberals. They're smarter than you, and know what best for you.
I'm always stunned to think that George Orwell was an avowed socialist.
He had no idea just how influential his books would become, as shining examples of why socialism is the very WORST system.
He KNEW the true nature of socialism, but couldn't quite "accept" where it would lead.
Orwell changed a great deal over time. As a young man he wrote saccharine poetry as he fought alongside the Spanish socialists in that country’s civil war: “No bomb that ever bursts shatters the crystal spirit,” he wrote. (I think that’s from Homage To Catalonia)
But as an older man he saw where the Russian experiment with socialism, at least, had gone awry because of human nature itself. From this time in his life we get Animal Farm and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four. By this time Orwell knew all too well that he had been naive. Winston Smith protests to O’Brien in 1984 that the spirit of humanity will ultimately defeat The Party, but we know how Smith ended up. O’Brien taught him the future of humanity is a boot stomping on a human face, forever. Crystal spirit, shattered.
He remained a sort of socialist, but clearly of the “Swedish not Soviet” sort.