Review of the Book

The Philosophy of Henry George
by George Raymond Geiger

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April, 1933]

In this volume of a little less than 600 pages Henry George receives his first definite assignment to the realm of philosophy. His sphere of thought is seen to be not the merely restricted economic field but the whole region of activities which constitute man's thought and being. Henry George is now found in a higher altitude than any previous commentator has been able to track him. The Henry George of Dr. George Raymond Geiger is a more impressive figure than is possible to any mere biography. We begin to appreciate the towering genius whose thought is destined to shake a world.

The work is not in the nature of an eulogy, and the impression of greatness is not gathered from what the writer says directly. Rather it is subtly conveyed. Dr. Geiger has done his work in no spirit of laudation. A calm, quite austere aloofness is the characteristic of what the author has written, yet we are conscious that we are asked to look on one of the most significant figures that has ever trod the earth. Yet the scales are never absent; our author weighs this philosopher and his conclusions with scrupulous exactness.

It is not a work to be skimmed through. It is high thinking and is not easy reading because high thinking is not easy. It was Goethe who said that "The Highest cannot be spoken in words." It is at least true that in an excursion into the higher realms of human reasoning and into the domain of rapt philosophy where the atmosphere is rarified to a degree that makes difficult its translation into the vernacular, we must proceed with caution and slow steps.

But after all philosophy is only a process of weighing, pondering and considering. Henry George proposed a tremendous change in the social order. He buttressed his defences with a system of philosophy that is all-embracing.

No embodiment of that philosophy since "Progress and Poverty" appeared has been so significantly achieved.

It is hard to speak of this woik in words that will not sound superlative. The word "scholarly" only half defines it. For that definition would not tell how the thought of Henry George is wrested from the content of his great works, the economic philosophy linked with the ethical, and the nice distinctions of George's reasoning facilitated for our more complete understanding. And to this task Dr. Geiger has brought a more general knowledge of the literature of the movement in all languages than is possessed by any man living. No summary of our philosophy will in future be complete without reference to this most important contribution to its literature.