Henry George: Champion of Individualism
Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
[An excerpt from the book, The American Spirit: A
Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States, published
in New York by The Macmillan Company, 1942]
Another exposition of individualism, qualified in this instance by a
reform proposal, was put forward by Henry George. Unlike Sumner,
George held no comfortable academic chair; unlike Woodrow Wilson, he
had no training in university lore. His native talents were not
whetted or dulled by adventures in the higher learning. He was brought
up in the school of hard work beyond the campus, saw poverty at first
hand, experienced its pangs directly. His incentive to thinking was
the search for a solution of the problem which many before him had
raised -- the contradiction between civilization and misery.
The solution of the problem which George proposed was given to the
world in his Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, and, in
a fuller setting in The Science of Political Economy, issued
in 1898, after his death. His solution took for granted the principal
assumptions and maxims upon which economic individualism rested - such
as private property, private enterprise, freedom of contract, and
competition -- but subject to one large qualification relative to
ground-rent.
Like all individualists, George was hostile to socialism, and he was
lukewarm if not unfriendly toward trade unions. He believed that
wealth and capital, other than land, flowed from individual enterprise
and labor; that competition was a necessary spur to economic activity
on the part of capital and labor; that all which the individual
created belonged to him, in fact would go to him, if the ground-rent
paid to landlords was diverted to the uses of society and land thrown
open to competitive enterprise. Ground-rent, he maintained, is a
product of society in action, not of individual enterprise and labor
by landlords. It is therefore, "unearned." If taken from
landlords by taxation and dedicated to the support of government,
other forms of property and business can be relieved, at least
largely, of taxation. At the same time individual capitalists and
laborers, by this reform in taxation, will be given free access to
land and resources, production will be augmented, and poverty wilt be
abolished. It was mainly in respect of this type of taxation that
George's system of pure economics differed from classical
individualism. It implied an intensification of the competitive
struggle for existence.
Both the problem and the solution proposed in his Progress and
Poverty, George placed, however, within the framework of
civilization. "This association of poverty with progress,"
he declared, "is the great enigma of our times. It is the central
fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties
that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy
and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang
the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the
riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which
not to answer is to be destroyed." Land represents a value
created by the whole community," by civilization, and the
appreciation of the economic income by landlords deprives the
community of its own wealth and accounts for the distressing poverty
that obstructs advance in civilization.
In that section of his Progress and Poverty entitled "The
Law of Human Progress,'' George emphasized the social nature of
civilization. "Beyond perhaps the veriest rudiments it becomes
possible for man to improve only as he lives with his fellows. All
these improvements, therefore, we summarize in the term civilization.
...This is the great fact with which we are concerned: That the
differences between the people of communities in different places and
at different times, which we call differences of civilization, are
not, ...as Herbert Spencer holds, differences in the units; but that
they are differences resulting from the conditions under which these
units are brought into the society." Among these varying
conditions, George placed divergences in knowledge, beliefs, customs,
language, tastes, institutions, and laws. Here he was seeking to
demonstrate the strength and ramifications of the social principle,
even though he made a gesture toward the fiction that there might have
been a man who had brought himself into the world and made some
improvements wholly apart from "his fellows."
What is the secret of progress -- advancement of civilization? That
question George undertook to answer concisely: "Mind is the
instrument by which man advances.
Mental power is the motor of
progress. ...Association in equality is its force." While the
words "mind" and "mental power," standing alone,
could be taken as if they referred to something inhering in individual
"units," considered in the context of George's whole volume
they could only refer to instruments or forces limited by and working
in or with the social accumulations at their command -- knowledge,
beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, laws, and material
possessions. At no point in dealing with civilization did he lend
countenance to the dogma of "the self-made man" which was in
the creed of individualism.
High authority for his conclusion on the simple point of taxing land
values, George drew from what he apprehended as the law of
civilization and decay: "The truth to which we were led in the
politico-economic branch of our inquiry is ... clearly apparent ... in
the growth and decay of civilizations, and it accords with those
deep-seated recognitions of relation and sequence that we denominate
moral perceptions. Thus are given to our conclusions the greatest
certitude and highest sanction. This truth involves both a menace and
a promise. It shows that the evils arising from the unjust and unequal
distribution of wealth, which are becoming more and more apparent as
modern civilization goes on, are not incidents of progress, but
tendencies which must bring progress to a halt; that they will not
cure themselves, but, on the contrary, must, unless their cause is
removed, grow greater and greater, until they sweep us back into
barbarism by the road which every previous civilization has trod."
But, introducing the optimistic note, George went on to assert that
if the proper remedy is applied, "the dangers that now threaten
must disappear, the forces that now menace will turn to agencies of
elevation. Think of the powers now wasted; of the infinite fields of
knowledge yet to be explored; of the possibilities of which the
wondrous inventions of this century have given us but a hint. With
want destroyed; with greed changed to noble passions; with the
fraternity that is born of equality taking the place of the jealousy
and fear that now array men against each other; with mental power
loosed by conditions that give to the humblest comfort and leisure;
and who shall measure the heights to which our civilization may soar?
It is the culmination of Christianity -- the City of God on
earth."
Of all the American economists since the early days of the Republic
none, not even Henry C. Carey, treated as comprehensively the
interfiliation of economy and civilization as George did in his Science
of Political Economy. None dwelt more steadfastly and trenchantly
on the contradiction between civilization and misery or sought a
resolution of the dilemma with a more single-minded devotion. Adverse
to the abstractness of classical economists, he did not assume that he
could "isolate the economic factors" from the contexture of
civilization and derive from them, so isolated in thought, a list of
irrefragable axioms, as if they were so isolated in actuality.
Instead, he thought of "economic factors" as aspects of
civilization.
But he did more. He considered the nature of the modern mind which
did the thinking about economics and he repulsed the notion that it
was an unconditioned power, independent of the things about which it
thought: "The observations and reflections of many succeeding
men, garnered and systematized, enable us of the modern civilization
to know, and with the eyes of the mind almost to see, things to which
the senses untaught by reason are blind." Even the mind that
thinks about economics or anything else is caught up with the sifting
and accumulation of knowledge that enter into civilization.
Recognizing the fact that economic activities and institutions occur
of necessity in civilization, George grasped the twin fact that
economics has no meaning outside civilization; and in many pages he
explored the idea of civilization -- its nature, its origin, and its
development -- besides recurring repeatedly to civilization in special
relations. At the outset he took note that "the word civilization
was in common use" and complained that "it is used with
vague and varying meanings, which refer to the qualities or results
that we attribute to the thing, rather than to the thing itself, the
existence or possibility of which we thus assume. Sometimes our
expressed or implied test of civilization is in the methods of
industry and control of natural forces. Sometimes it is in the extent
and diffusion of knowledge. Sometimes in the kindliness of manners and
justice and benignity of laws and institutions. Sometimes it may be
suspected that we use the word as do the Chinese when they class as
barbarians 'all humanity outside of the 'Central Flowery Kingdom.' And
there is point in the satire which tells how men who had lost their
way in the wilderness, exclaimed at length when they reached a prison:
'Thank God, we are at last in civilization.' "
Buckle had written two volumes on the history of civilization, "but
does not venture to say what civilization is." Guizot had written
on civilization, declared its existence and its importance, but had
not defined the term. In this confusion, having decided that the idea
was vital to his thinking about "the nature of political economy,"
George attempted a definition himself of the popular but apparently
elusive term.
The problem thus posed George attacked directly by way of etymology: "The
word civilization comes from the Latin civis, a citizen. Its
original meaning is, the manner or condition in which men live
together as citizens. Now the relations of the citizen to other
citizens, which are in their conception peaceable and friendly,
involving mutual obligations, mutual rights, and mutual services,
spring from the relation of each citizen to the whole of which each is
an integral part. That whole, from membership in which proceeds the
relationship of citizens to each other, is the body politic, or
political community, which we name the state."
But true to the natural-rights world-view of the eighteenth century,
already expressed in the writings of Thomas Paine, George held that
the relation "suggested in this word civilization" is "deeper,
wider, arid closer than the relation of the citizen to the state, and
prior to it.
Civilization is the antecedent and the state the
subsequent. The appearance and development of the body politic ... is
the mark of civilization already in existence. Not in itself
civilization, it involves and presupposes civilization.
The
character of the state, the nature of the laws and institutions which
it enacts and enforces, indicate the character of the underlying
civilization."
In George's theory, civilization not only underlies all states but it
is wider than the mere jurisdictions of states and so cuts across
those political boundaries: "Whether we consider them in their
grand divisions or their minor divisions, the line between what we
call civilizations is not the line of separation between bodies
politic. The United States and Canada, or the United States and Great
Britain, are separate bodies politic, yet their civilization is the
same. The making of the Queen of Great Britain Empress of India does
not substitute the English civilization for the Indian civilization in
Bengal, nor the Indian civilization for the English civilization in
Yorkshire or Kent. Change in allegiance involves changes in
citizenship, but in itself involves no change in the civilization.
Civilization is evidently a relation which underlies the relations of
the body politic."
If George made a slip in logic or history when he defined
civilization as the civic relationships of a body politic or political
community and immediately declared civilization to be prior to and
independent of bodies politic or political communities, there was
certitude in his statement that civilization is essentially social in
nature and man more than an individual: "He is also a social
animal, formed and adapted to live and cooperate with his fellows. It
is in this line of social development that the great increase of man's
knowledge and powers takes place.
The rise of civilization is
the growth of this cooperation and the increase of the body of
knowledge thus obtained and garnered."
But having treated civilization in this broad sense, George suddenly
narrowed it: "It is this body economic, or body industrial, which
grows up in the cooperation of men to supply their wants and satisfy
their desires, that is the real thing constituting what we call
civilization.
The body politic or state is really an outgrowth
of the body economic." Still, in this restricted sense, the
feature of cooperation was an essential item in George's idea of
civilization.
Even after he had declared the body economic or industrial to be the
real thing constituting civilization, George recurred to his broader
view. As if returning to Guizot's distinction between the exterior and
the interior aspects of civilization, George wrote: "We measure
civilization in various ways, for it has various aspects or sides;
various lines along which the general advance implied in the word
shows itself -- as in knowledge, in power, in wealth, in justice and
kindliness.
The aspect of civilization most quickly apprehended
in common thought is that of a keener sense of justice and a kindlier
feeling between man and man. ...While an increased regard for the
rights of others and an Increased sympathy with others is not all
there is in civilization, it is an expression of its moral side. And
as the moral relates to the spiritual, this aspect of civilization is
the highest, and does indeed furnish the truest sign of general
advance."
Despite his treatment of civilization at one place as if it were
static -- the body politic, economic, or industrial in which
cooperation occurs -- at other points in his discussion of the
subject, George made it changeful, dynamic. Man, he contended, is not
only a social and cooperative animal; he is "the only progressive
animal. Here is the germ of civilization." But he did not think
an elaboration of this theme necessary to his Science of Political
Economy. "To consider the history of civilization, with its
slow beginnings, its long periods of quiescence, its sudden flashes
forward, its breaks and retrogressions, would carry me further than I
can here attempt. Something of that the reader may find in the last
grand division of Progress and Poverty, Book X entitled, 'The
Law of Human Progress."" Thus, resembling the classical
school of economists in general, George left out of his reckoning the
question whether his Science of Political Economy might become
invalidated by civilization conceived as progress. And, having
explored and adopted the idea of civilization, he endorsed the chief
features of economic individualism except unearned increment in land.
Even so, and despite his acceptance of individualism and competition,
subject to this form of taxation, George antagonized the school of "pure
individualism" by placing economic activities firmly in the
contexture of civilization - by making economics a phase of
civilization. In fact he drove a big wedge into the closed system of
economic thought as individualism, whether supported or not by the
prestige of an alliance with civilization. He precipitated a terrific
debate over the capitalist system of economy. By declaring that the
landlord's ground-rent was a product of civilization, in society, and
that it should be expropriated for public purposes, he hurled into the
forum of discussion the vexing issue as to whether other forms of
wealth were not in significant respects the products of civilization
and society, also properly subject to expropriation in the public
interest.
In his political economy, George separated civilization from the
jurisdiction of particular states, or bodies politic, and made it
anterior to the state. But in practice he called upon each independent
state to abolish poverty, to promote civilization by measures of
taxation applicable only within its jurisdiction. While the "laws"
of economics applied everywhere, civilization in the United States
could be advanced by action taken within the American nation, he
believed. So George and his disciples launched a nation-wide agitation
to force upon American governments -- municipal, state, and federal --
the policy of seizing ground-rent by taxation.
' In other words, Henry George did more than file an academic dissent
from an academic theory. He denied to one intrinsic element of the
fully rounded theory relative to capitalist individualism the benefit
of a high sanction -- civilization. He declared that one great source
of private accumulation -- ground-rent totaling billions a year in the
United States -- was a product of civilization in American society and
belonged of right to the community. And he helped to restore the
social principle to thought about economics from which it had been
ousted by extremists of the individualist school, even though he
himself espoused for practical purposes nearly all the fundamental
principles of individualism.
Not only that. George assailed a main bastion of the capitalist
system, not merely by writing a book, but by conducting a campaign of
agitation that carried the issue of civilization and individualism
into the popular forum where reformers of many kinds were debating all
phases of American civilization. If to a few capitalists, notably Tom
L. Johnson, George appeared to be an ally, to most of them he was
subversive of everything that sustained their system. If to various
schools of reform, George's attachment to leading principles of
individualism was anathema, hit agitation brought grist to their mill.
As a consequence, in proposing to qualify unadulterated capitalism,
under the formula of civilization, Henry George tightened in many
quarters the grip which the idea of civilization had on American minds
at the same time that he gave a powerful impetus to the thrust of
individualism against civilization.
********
In spirit the idea of individualism was optimistic whether in its
straight and simple type or as qualified by the plan of the single-tax
reform proposed by Henry George, and the disruptive force of its
thrust into the idea of civilization was the greater on that account.
This is not to say that all individualists were confident about the
future of their system. They were not. Sumner, like an ancient Hebrew
prophet, finding his precepts ignored by dissenters and scouted by
reformers, declared that the years ahead would be full of wars"
and revolutions. His own scheme of individualism, pure and true-blue,
which he regarded as rigorously framed and founded on facts, would be
disputed, Sumner admitted; indeed was being disputed, by Americans who
knew not, or would not abide by, the true faith. As a rule, however,
the lay and the academic elite assumed that individualism was good,
would endure indefinitely, if not forever, and would march from
victory to victory, without running into disastrous storms or Into an
effective counter-reformation. Optimistic prophecy succeeded
optimistic prophecy.
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