Is Georgist Thought an Intellectual Desert
or an Oasis?

Cliff Cobb

[Reprinted from Quicksilver, Winter, 2006]

There is a strain of anti-intellectual-ism that runs deep in American culture. It says that ideas don't matter, only actions do. Americans pride themselves on being practical in orientation, on considering moral questions on a case-by-case basis instead of in terms of general principles, and on learning from personal experience more than from history, complex reasoning, or the scientific method.

The philosophy of Henry George, at least as interpreted by many of his followers, shares in the weaknesses of this anti-intellectual pragmatism. It offers a mechanistic solution (land value taxation) to a host of social ills. That solution can supposedly be adopted without a deep understanding of its premises or its consequences. Like most other American thinkers, Georgists have adopted a method that C. Wright Mills called "abstracted empiricism." That is to say, it is long on deductive reasoning and the accumulation of supportive facts, but it is short on true theory-building and theory-testing. Georgists start with a simple premise about natural rights, derive a concept of ownership from it, observe a number of stylized facts that fit the premise, and imagine that the work is complete. Georgism participates in the dominant American ideology that truth is both obvious and immediately practical. There is a startling lack of subtlety or ambiguity in its principles.

At least one eminent historian has suggested that Georgists are more thoroughly alienated from the world of ideas than other Americans. In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter's 1962 book for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, two of his twelve initial examples of anti-intellectualism were essays by libertarian Georgists (Jack Schwartzman and Frank Chodorov). Although Hofstadter's criteria for defining anti-intellectualism were themselves highly biased, the fact that two Georgists were chosen as examples should give us pause. Is Georgism nothing more than a municipal tax policy? Does it deserve the neglect it receives in universities? Is it any wonder that so few undergraduates are exposed to Georgist thought, except as a minor footnote in Samuel-son's economic text?

Until such time as it is developed into a comprehensive social and political theory, Georgist philosophy may merit its relative obscurity. In order to function effectively as a theoretical perspective able to attract a broad constituency, Georgism would have to be formulated on the same level as the pessimistic Malthusian-Darwinian thought that has given modern conservatism its legitimacy or the optimistic Rousseau-Deweyan philosophy that underpins progressive thought. Only by developing a philosophy with that degree of generality will Georgists be able to engage in the debates that shape the minds of the university-educated public for an entire generation or more, hi short, Georgism cannot succeed at the retail level (as a force in politics) until it has first gained credibility at the wholesale level (as a broad intellectual construct).

The implicit, yet undeveloped, strength of Georgist philosophy lies in its capacity to fulfill the Hegelian promise of synthesis and reconciliation of opposites. Within economic theory, Georgism offers a way to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between equity and efficiency. The same method might, in principle, be applied to a broad range of intellectual and social issues. For example, a more encompassing Georgism might help resolve some of the following intellectual puzzles:

• the continuing struggle within liberal political theory to bring together the diverse ways of understanding the split between the public and private domains;
  
• the enduring problem of understanding how human behavior is both seemingly free from a subjective perspective and seemingly determined by objective events;
  
• the conflict of historiography between ideals and material forces as explanatory factors;
  
• the confusions that arise in political theory by conflating coercive power and legitimating authority;
  
• the methodological split within the social sciences between meaning (hermeneutics) and explanation (prediction);
  
• the ideologically decisive question about whether human nature is primarily competitive and individualistic or cooperative and social.

If Georgism has the capacity to resolve those and similar conflicts that serve as the basis of ideological differences, it would be able to sweep aside all contenders and become the dominant public philosophy for many generations. That will happen, however, only if some of those who recognize the potential act on it by developing the intellectual tools to demonstrate the power of Georgist philosophy.

The failure of Georgism to generate a general public philosophy has always been a serious liability, not merely in the classroom, but at the ballot box as well. Georgist fiscal policies cannot succeed as part of a typical legislative agenda based on compromise and logrolling. They do not fit within the Madisonian vision of trade-offs among competing interest groups. Their only hope of adoption is through a generalized refraining of political issues and broader understanding of self-interest that supersedes normal political bargaining. That reorientation can occur only if Georgjsm can be conceived as an encompassing philosophical perspective that transcends the bounds of narrow economic considerations. Pseudo-Georgism occasionally gains some temporary political ground by supporting policies that appeal to one interest group among many and engaging in politics as usual. For a century those who promote two-rate tax policies (which raise taxes on land and lower them on buildings) have followed this "strategy" by appealing to the self-interest of homeowners whose taxes will decline. But there is an unbridgeable chasm between this policy and genuine Georgism. The ultimate aim of Georgist tax policy is not to shift property taxes among property owners, but to remove taxes from wages and shift them onto land. By selling Georgism as a species of tax relief for homeowners (rather than wage-earners), the two-rate property tax movement may actually be counter-productive. It creates the illusion that Georgist reform can be achieved through the manipulation of interest group behavior, and it detracts from efforts to develop a distinctive style of Georgist politics.

The only strategy that stands a chance of adopting genuine Georgist reform is one that builds a political movement across existing ideologies on behalf of a new conception of the commongood.

No amount of political organizing or message development could form such a movement at present. The ideas that would form its intellectual base do not yet exist. They may never come into existence unless an effort is made to develop a constructive public philosophy based on the methods and insights of Henry George and other synthetic thinkers.

A few of those other synthetic thinkers include G.F.W. Hegel, Emile Durkheim, J.M. Keynes, A.N. Whitehead, Rene Dubos, Iredell Jenkins, and Buckminster Fuller. Each of these men perceived elements of organic unity behind a multiplicity of apparent differences. Without a public philosophy based on their perception of unity that transcends overlapping self-interest, the end result must necessarily be social fragmentation and a failure to sustain the cooperative spirit necessary for economic justice.

The achievement of justice calls for the application of an organic or synthetic principle to the political realm. I call it the principle of indirect causation.

It is a deep (and ultimately unprovable) axiom of the thinkers listed above that indirect methods will succeed where direct methods fail. Yet, Georgists have consistently failed to apply this to the political process. They have jumped directly into the political fray with thousands of piecemeal remedies of the very sort that they know will not work in the economic arena. Effective political solutions will flow only from a strategy that creates the right conditions for change rather than trying to make them happen.

It took hundreds of pages for Henry George to explain how the principle of indirect causation could be applied to economic conditions to resolve the perennial problem of poverty (and various other social problems). Equivalent principles for indirect political change cannot be derived in a few sentences of paragraphs. For now all that is necessary is an awareness that current Georgist thinking about political change is mired in Madisonian analysis of interest groups and must be reformulated. Precisely what the alternative might look like is not yet apparent.

I began by suggesting that Georgists have all too often embraced a typically American form of anti-intellectualism. They have treated activism as a substitute for thought by promoting land value taxation as a technical fix. They have made few efforts to connect their ideas to the methodological and substantive debates within the social sciences.

The narrow range of Georgist thought is not inevitable, however. Hope lies in the capacity of George's synthetic method to overcome the antinomies of modern thought.

That transformation is important not only for the intellectual development of a generation that is increasingly lost in postmodern despair. It is also unlikely that Georgist economic reforms will gain widespread acceptance until such time as the broader framework of Georgist thought is adopted.