On the 40th Anniversay of
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
Will Lissner
[Reprinted from The American Journal of Economics and
Sociology,
Vol.40, No.4, October, 1981]
THIS JOURNAL has now completed 40 years of service to the
social science sector of the country's scientific community and to the
American people whose work that community benefits.[1] Forty years!
Four decades!
It is hard to believe that 40 years ago, in the midst of a war that
was soon to engulf the world and at the close of a catastrophic
depression that was ended only by production for war, we launched this
scholarly enterprise. It is even harder to believe that thereafter,
quarter after quarter, we have brought out issue after issue.[2]
This Journal is a product of the Georgist movement; the 21
directors of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, who sponsor and
finance it, the editor in-chief, the business manager, their close
associates, a majority of the editorial council and many of the
members of the editorial board are followers of Henry George, the 19th
century American economist and social philosopher.
The distinguished British economist, Mark Blaug, has referred to this
Journal as "a Georgist journal," and, of course, the
designation, in view of the above, is accurate. But I wonder if our
readers understand as well as Professor Blaug what the
characterization means.
When the editor-in-chief won the backing of the foundation for the
enterprise, he received a mandate from the foundation's directors, and
from the original editorial council which included John Dewey, the
philosopher, and Franz Oppenheimer, the sociologist, to run the Journal
as a scientific journal, not an ideological organ.
It has taken hard research by Georgist and non-Georgist scholars to
prove that George was wrong when he disclaimed originality for his own
contributions. And this was particularly true with respect to this
Journal's reason for being - the promotion of
interdisciplinary research.
The decision to make interdisciplinary research the basis of our work
was mine and it was entirely a pragmatic one. I believed then, and I
believe now, that the challenging problems of democratic capitalist
society can be solved - not by some genius's blueprint, and not
necessarily by some current program - but by using the whole range of
the social sciences and philosophy to achieve an objective analysis of
a problem and an understanding of its rational solution. And this
belief also betrays George's influence, as John Dewey made clear in
his "Introduction" to our first issue:
"Although the American Journal of Economics and Sociology
is not committed to swearing loyalty to any one master, it is
certainly fitting that an American endeavor at synthesis in the social
field should honor the work of Henry George. For I know of no writer
by whom the interdependence of all aspects and phases of human
relations, economic, political, cultural, moral, has been so
vigorously and so sympathetically set forth."
Few journals last a generation. Why has our journal survived where
other journalistic enterprises railed? I think it is because it tends
to apply closely one of the tenets of our democratic social
philosophy: that association in equality is the key to human progress.
As Francis Neilson so ably pointed out in reply to Albert Jay Nock, we
Georgists are not elitists; we believe that every person is a unique
individual, with talents which, if made available to all through
individual enterprise or through voluntary association in properly
rewarded ventures in which individuals cooperate, enable him or her to
make a distinct contribution to human culture which assures human
survival and well being.
And that is what we have been fighting for these forty years. The
restoration or the introduction of free, fair and open competition in
a market open to all on an equal basis without fear or favor, so that
individuals and groups, when serving their own interest, can serve
best the general interest.
We are not anarchists, though we share with Peter Kropotkin and his
brethren a love for freedom that does not degenerate into license. We
are individualists. But by free compact, we think, individuals can
form associations that will function more efficiently as social
organizations than any the socialists can contrive. Or the communists
fantasize.
Our association has functioned effectively and survived, I think,
because we clearly defined our goal at the outset and allowed no
deviation from it. We felt that, the vital need of our times was
research conducted by the interdisciplinary approach[3] and that this
research could be promoted by making available a means of
communication among those devoted to this field.[4] From our very
first board to the present one we always included non-Georgists and
from our very first issue to the last one we have had only one
ideological means test for contributors: commitment to scientific
method and philosophical inquiry.[5]
Indeed, during the 40 years we have never rejected an article by a
competent social scientist attacking our basic beliefs; if we received
one that was deficient, just as with other manuscripts, we helped the
author to do the best job of which he or she was capable. In this we
followed Henry George and John Stuart Mill in the tenet that the
antagonistic critic, in posing difficulties, was doing our work for us
and hence should earn our gratitude.
And during the 40 years we have always afforded our authors the
widest freedom of expression (even when, with reluctance, we have to
publish criticism concocted more out of anger than moral
responsibility.)[6] By our policies we have mobilized a corps of
10,000 research workers and specialized students in more than 100
countries who are interested in our problems.
If our experience proves anything, it is that freedom works. And
hence we think that future generations will cultivate freedom with the
same zeal that past generations cultivated rule.
What have we achieved in 40 years? The interdisciplinary approach,
which we considered so necessary to solution of the problems besetting
western civilization, is now fully accepted in the social sciences as
a method of investigation, as a method of developing policy and for
evaluating alternatives.
In the prospectus that rallied together the founding scholars, I
wrote that "the conviction is spreading that the solution
involves the development of practical means for improving the spirit
of society, its social ethic; for abolishing the quasi-monopoly of
man's natural environment; for bringing order into the chaos of the
tax system; for abolishing industrial monopolies and all special
privileges; for aiding the experiments in voluntary cooperation which
provide the only substitutes for State paternalism - in a word, means
for liberating the free spirit of man."[6]
This is a good test of a group's achievements. During the 40 years
millions have been murdered in international wars. Fascism and
communism, nationalism and terrorism, imperialism, despotism and
messianism have claimed millions upon millions of victims, children as
well as men and women. Has the conscience of society been quickened
even a little?
In ending the quasi-monopoly of the environment, we and all who have
worked in this area have been more successful. The universe (apart
from Earth) and space have been declared by the nations the common
heritage of all mankind and even the claims of coming generations are
being recognized. The deep oceans and the continental shelves have
been protected from the monopolists. And even on the land masses the
common right of all people to the earth and its resources is achieving
greater and greater acceptance.
We cannot say that much order has been achieved in our chaotic tax
system but the issue is high on the agenda in the United States and
other advanced industrial countries. Nor has much progress been made
in ending monopolies and privileges but the work of scholars has
helped immensely to achieve popular understanding of the issue. And we
have had many experiments in voluntary cooperation with widely varying
results.
In sum, in so far as our aim was to achieve rational control of the
troubles that beleaguer us all, our scholars have won some notable
engagements; but the critical battles of the war are yet to be fought.
However, this does not dismay us. We never expected to arrive at
Utopia in little more than a generation. Indeed, we never expected to
reach Utopia at all. We realized full well that each generation must
fight to win its liberties the same as the generations before it.
It is the fight for freedom that gives meaning to our lives. We are
seekers of facts, insights and understandings. These are our weapons,
the only weapons we know how to use, and in the long run they will
prevail over myth, superstition, deception and ignorance. We dare not
rest. We dare not turn a deaf ear to the clarion call.
No dictatorship, no powerful ruler can give us the free society. We
must create it by restoring rational order to a chaotic social system.
Scholarship is not the only means of doing so, but it is the basis on
which the educators, the writers, the journalists, the broadcasters
and the publicists create popular sentiment and the public will. If
the scholars do their work, the other professions will do theirs. And
some day - not too many generations from now, I hope - the world will
be a better place in which to live and the people will be less ashamed
of their times than we are.
And so we, who by work or contribution or subscription make this Journalpossible,
may take a certain measure of satisfaction in what we have
accomplished in 40 years. The future is brighter because of our
efforts. The struggle has been difficult but it has been worthwhile.
Notes
1. This report to the readers, editors and production workers of the
American Journal of Economics and Sociology is the gist of a
report I made to the board of directors of the Robert Schalkenbach
Foundation at its annual meeting in New York on June 8, 1981.
Afterward John M. Kelly of Scranton, Pa., voiced the consensus that
the report be shared with our editors and readers. Within the same
space constraints we impose on authors, I here do so.
2. That we did so, even when I served abroad as a war correspondent
and a fleet correspondent, as a special correspondent in the Caribbean
and Central America and even during several month-long stays in the
hospital when I did my editing flat on my back, was due largely to our
business manager, V. G. Peterson (Mrs. Malcolm Graham). "Miss
Pete," as she was known in the office, was in charge of
production, which assured that it would be done competently,
efficiently, and with an eye to typographical artistry in keeping with
our design by the late Wallace Kibbee. "Miss Pete" overcame
all obstacles by wholehearted devotion to the Journal's
interests; her dedicated work has continued despite her retirement as
executive secretary of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation several
years ago. Our 40-year partnership I count as one of the great
blessings of my life. Her enlistment to replace a friend who
disappointed us was one of two fortuitous circumstances that assured
our success. The other was that Leonard Recker, then a Schalkenbach
director, found a printer for us - Jacques Cattell, former publisher
(in succession to his father, J. McKeen Cattell of Columbia), of Science
Weekly in Lancaster, Pa. Cattell, personally interested in our
enterprise, set the first year's prices at what we could afford, but
so low as to be what he could afford only briefly. By the time prices
had to be raised to market levels we were off and running. (Cattell
was the godfather of many a scholarly enterprise.) A few years ago,
after he had sold it, his Science Press of Lancaster, renamed Business
Press, retired from business when offset replaced letterpress
printing.
3. I had learned from the work of Franz Oppenheimer, George Geiger
and Adolph Lowe that economic solutions to the problems of democratic
capitalist society depended on sociological and philosophical
arguments, as Dewey, who had come to philosophy by way of psychology,
had long held, the Journal had to have a reason for being that
distinguished it from the older journals in the field. So I made a
virtue out of a necessity: a commitment to the interdisciplinary
approach to the analysis and study of economic, social and political
problems. Of course we did not originate this approach. It dates at
least from Comte. In the 19th century Herbert Spencer, Henry George,
William Graham Sumner and others employed it with notable skill, and
in out century so did Max Weber and Franz Oppenheimer. In the 1920s
the approach was cultivated for urban studies at the University of
Chicago. John Dewey developed it in studying the unity of science. I
learned it from Dewey (at the labor colleges where I did my
undergraduate work and where Dewey was a visiting lecturer, not at
Columbia where George Geiger and Mortimer Adler were lucky enough to
have been his students), from the works of such as Eileen Power and
Henri Pirenne and from the textbooks of Carlton J. H. Hayes and Harry
J. Carman. Their tradition at Columbia was carried on by the
distinguished sociologist, Robert K. Merton, and my friend, Paul
Lazarsfeld, the social psychologist. Talcott Parsons and Neil J.
Smelser also developed it at Harvard. In Europe there has been a
notable development at several universities. All we can claim is that
ours was the first American journal to make the interdisciplinary
approach its reason for being. And we cannot make too much of that
-several outstanding multidisciplinary journals are older, e.g. the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Alvin Johnson's Social Research, Columbia's Political
Science Quarterly, Daedalus of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in Boston and the Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. And physicians,
engineers, lawyers as legislators, theologians and military
administrators have long practiced it.
4. A little bit of history may be interesting. Why did we go to the
trouble of setting up this Journal? In 1939, when I revived
the weekly freeman as a monthly and built it, with Frank
Chodorov's help on promotion, into a self-sustaining enterprise with a
wide range of contributors and a 5,000 circulation, I became impressed
with the fact that we could not prove the case for the basic beliefs
of ethical democracy: the primacy of land and natural resources in the
economic process, the crucial role of privilege, monopoly and
oligopoly in distorting the distribution of income and hence wealth,
and so on. It was apparent that we could make a case for our views
only because our opponents lacked the data to prove us wrong.
So I proposed to Frank, who had quit his job as a traveling salesman
for an underwear line to become the director of the Henry George
School in New York, that we define the problems requiring validation
or refutation and try to get teachers in graduate schools to assign
them as dissertation topics to their candidates for masters' and
doctoral degrees. I set down as many as I could think of, Frank added
four or five and a teacher at the school two or three and we had the
material for a four-page folder. Leonard and Gene Recker saw to its
printing and we circulated it, with a letter, widely.
But we didn't get a single taker. Up to that time I had only taught
and lectured to undergraduates; only after the war did I specialize in
teaching graduate or professional students. I was naive about graduate
student research. I did not know that degree candidates and their
faculty committees tended to prefer safe topics to avoid the failures
arising from inability to complete dissertations which plague graduate
study.
It was essential that something be done. John Dewey, Harold S.
Buttenheim, Eduard C. Lindemann, George Raymond Geiger, John Haynes
Holmes, Ben Huebsch, Norman Thomas, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard
Shaw and others equally notable had done their best to make people
realize that Henry George was a social philosopher to be reckoned with
and that a revival of the social philosophy of the Progressive Era was
badly needed by a country and a world now disillusioned with the
get-rich-quick materialism of the 1920s. But the efforts of Dewey and
the others only persuaded a few of the better educated.
Still holding the belief that research ("ideas are plans of
action," Dewey taught) was the answer, I decided to shift my
hopes to professional research workers in the social sciences. I
realized I would have to spend a year doing research myself into how,
with our very limited resources, we could get professional researchers
interested in our problems. I became convinced that if we had a
scientific journal that served as a medium of communication among
research workers, it could stimulate that interest. So I turned the
monthly Freeman over to Chodorov and got my good friend Grover
Cleveland Loud, a New York Times editor, to continue Frank's
training in editorial and essay writing. The big question was could we
get enough publishable papers? I was ready to pad out the book with
translations of important foreign articles (at the time, in addition
to being the Times's economic journalist, I was monitoring the
world's government radio stations in half a dozen languages) but we
needed a few original ones for each issue. My studies had turned up
nine scholars who could be counted on for the editorial board. They
were headed by John Dewey, who, of course, would endorse the project
since I was one of his proteges (in elementary school I had been one
of 60 pupils from various schools in New York City chosen to test one
of his theories). They included the economists Harry Gunnison Brown,
Harold Hotelling and John Ise, the sociologists Glenn E. Hoover and
Franz Oppenheimer, the human geographer Raymond E. Crist and the
philosophers George Raymond Geiger and Mortimer J. Adler. I recruited
the group with a manifesto I believe is still up-to-date (it was used
recently to found a competing quarterly). Then I sold Chodorov, a
consummate salesman, on my program. I still remember that conference -
on my lunch hour, for I worked at night - in the cafeteria that used
to be on the site of the New York Telephone Company building at 42nd
Street and Avenue of the Americas in New York. Chodorov sold it to Vi
Peterson - who has always been open to new ideas - and to the 21
directors of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
To strengthen our editorial board and our contributors' list, I
twisted the arms of Schalkenbach directors and got them to serve as
editors and writers (all are scholars, of course, including those who
work on Wall Street and in government). And at that point I had a
great stroke of luck.
For several years I had been editing the books of Francis Neilson,
one of radical liberalism's great essayists. Dr. Neilson had had such
an unhappy experience with the old Freeman that he swore he
would never again get involved in a periodical. He tried to salve his
conscience with a pledge of a large annual contribution but I returned
his check, telling him I needed articles, not money. (That was true;
subscriptions were coming in at a volume which covered expenses, held
to the minimum by "Miss Pete.") By editing an excerpt from
one of his recent books and a recent lecture he had given into
articles, I convinced him that he belonged foursquare in our midst.
Before the first volume was completed he wrote his first original
article for the Journal and thereafter he could always be
counted on for an article or two, mostly in cultural sociology of
which he had made a lifelong and systematic study, each quarter. This
continued right to the end of his life at 94, 20 years later, though
aging had left him blind and deaf. (In his sighted days he had
carefully marked his books and his devoted literary secretary, Miss K.
Phyllis Evans, knew precisely where to find quotations he needed to
have read to refresh his remarkable recollection.)
5. The members of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation board, who were
(and still are) as much dedicated to academic and literary freedom as
to economic and other freedom, had certain misgivings about the
project. They learned that academic enterprises were plagued by
log-rolling and back-scratching and cliquish monopolization. The board
of another Georgist magazine had to begin considering whether to
remove its editor, who by insults and rudeness had driven those who
differed with his individualist anarchism to resignation and replaced
them with cronies. So they appointed a committee of three to monitor
the editor to see that he remained honest and treated all contributors
with equal consideration while maintaining the highest standards of
scientific ethics. The three were pledged never to interfere in
editorial matters and they have never done so. No member of the
committee or the foundation board has ever discussed with me or the
other editors any submission or any article, though they often say, in
general terms, how much they enjoy and profit from reading the
magazine. (This is also true of foundation boards of which I have
personal knowledge, but instances of abridgment of academic and
literary freedom are not infrequent in the literature.) I have always
made good use of the committee. O. K. Dorn, our first president,
looked after our business affairs, coming to the office every day to
worry with "Miss Pete" about costs and revenues until they
balanced. Charles Johnson Post was persuaded to write. And Albert
Pleydell, who later succeeded Dorn, then teaching at New York
University, handled our university relations.
6. I had to intervene early when Oppenheimer and Hoover descended to
rancor in differing over the nature of the present economic system.
Recently I suffered soul-searching anguish when one of my friends
dealt angrily with a critic. I could have edited the anger out on the
ground that ours was not a journal of opinion. But I thought it might
have some significance for the history of economic thought and
deleting it might be doing the historians a disservice. Until the
controversy progressed I did not know that I made the right decision
in leaving the anger in. (Normally we discuss this with an author; in
this instance, discussion might have influenced him irrationally.)
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