How Henry George Made History
Ronald Yanosky
[An address delivered at the 1996 Council of Georgist
Organizations conference.
Reprinted in GroundSwell, March-April 1997]
I came here to talk to you about how Henry George made history. I
mean that phrase in a special sense of' "making" history the
way somebody "makes" the headlines. That is, I want to
discuss the various reasons why historians (and I mean non-Georgist
historians) have considered George significant enough to write about,
and how they've approached the task of interpreting his life and work.
Before I go on, I should stress that my field is American history, and
what I have to say will primarily consider the American context in
which George worked. But a good deal of what I say here could be
applied, mutatis mutandis in other countries where George has been
influential.
Historians have tried to find a place for Henry George in the history
of American reform in three basic ways. The simplest, which has
origins in Georges own lifetime, has been to characterize his ideas in
terms of his ostensibly eccentric personality, in short, Henry George
as crank. One of the few remaining examples of this approach appears
in Robert Heilbronner's enormously successful textbook on the history
of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers. There
Heilbronner, though demonstrating a certain admiration for George as
reformer and moralist, breezily describes the economist as a "semi-crackpot"
and "almost-Messiah who inhabited the "underworld" of
Victorian economic thought. The crank interpretation, however, has
been difficult to maintain ever since Charles Albro Barker's masterful
biography of George appeared in 1955. Barker's George was a man of
broad interest sand high intellectual gifts, a self-taught
sophisticate who could hold his own in exchanges with the likes of
John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Russell Wallace. This
was Henry George as intellectual. So cosmopolitan and many-faceted was
this George that one could hardly believe that he would develop, let
alone promote, so simple an idea as the single tax. And indeed, Barker
defended George from just that accusation. The single tax, Barker
insisted, was a "derivation" from George's work, consistent
with but not characteristic of his thought. Barker implied that it was
George's followers, not the economist himself, who were the cranks.
The most enduring interpretation of George, however, and the easiest
to square with our rather chaotic picture of the Gilded Age, is George
as "prophet of unrest," one of a number of rare birds who
populated the late nineteenth century radical scene. In this scenario
the single tax is rather like a gaudy piece of bric-a-brac in some
Victorian whatnot cabinet, where it is displayed alongside any number
of other nostrums of the day, such as Edward Bellamy's
utopian-socialist Nationalism, or Henry Demarest Lloyd's
Hegelian-flavored social democracy, or perhaps free silver, the
agricultural subtreasury, or Ethical Culture. The assortment of
prophets varies a bit from author to author, but this interpretation
usually presents its subjects as transitional figures who stand
between the two reform traditions that historians feel they understand
best the antebellum reformism that culminated in the abolition of
slavery then dwindled a way during Reconstruction, and the
Progressive-era movement s that gave us twentieth-century "liberalism."
Henry George appears in such accounts as something of a place holder
who helps tend the flame of reform until the real achievers, the
Progressives or perhaps the socialists, show up for work.
This way of making history with Henry George has the advantage for
the historian of organizing a whole collection of exotic phenomena
under a single, if rather forced, category. The approach has been a
boon to textbook writers, who regularly dispense with George and
Bellamy in the same short paragraph. The best recent expression of the
"prophets of unrest" scenario, Professor John Thomas's Alternative
America, uncovers some illuminating parallels in the careers of
George, Bellamy, and Lloyd. But Thomas does so at the cost of
understating the truly dramatic differences between George and the
others, grouping all three of them together within a common "adversary
tradition." So we have Henry George as crank, as intellectual man
of the world, and as generic prophet of unrest.
If there is a single theme common to all of these interpretations, it
has been historians' unwillingness lo take the economist seriously
when he said, as he did in Progress and Poverty, that the land
value tax would "raise wages, increase the earnings of capital,
extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employment to
whoever wishes it, ... lessen crime, elevate morals, and taste, and
intelligence, purify government and carry civilization to yet nobler
heights." The crank theory holds that George was crazy to believe
this; the intellectual theory says that he was too smart to really
mean it: and the prophet-of-unrest theory maintains that what really
counts about George was his social critique and good intentions, not
his unfortunate and somewhat embarrassing panacea.
The irony here is that these historical interpretations measure
George by just the standard of social analysis that George himself was
fighting in the last years of his life: the Progressive social
scientists' notion that societies are highly complex, that they must
be managed rather than transformed, and that sound social theory is
developed by disinterested, formally-trained experts who make limited
claims and avoid reference either to natural law or to moral
intuition. To historians whose own professional standards constitute
one variation on this line of thought, the fact that Henry George
could have believed that the system of land tenure affected virtually
every social relationship, or that his followers could literally
regard converting to Georgism ("seeing the cat," in their
phrase) as a religious awakening, has posed a fundamental problem of
credibility that scholars have variously treated with sarcasm,
evasion, or apologetics.
Yet it is not necessary to do so. The very differentness that we
recognize in the nineteenth-century single taxers, their enthusiasm
and their supposed monomania, are clues to a major historical
transformation shift in what we recognize as credible and inspiring
social thought. George did indeed envision, in Professor Thomas's
phrase, an alternative America, but the tools he used in constructing
his political economy were far more deeply embedded in the national
culture than the German "socialism of the chair" that
inspired so many Progressive social scientists.
From the evangelical Protestantism of his youth George borrowed the
notion of transformative change, the idea, so fundamental to American
religious culture, that one can be "born again," shifting
from a state of sin to a state of grace in a single revelatory moment.
From his Jacksonian political heritage George derived an ideal of
social equality and the concept that natural differences of talent
could not account for the enormous differences of condition that
prevailed in Gilded Age America. From his study of classical political
economy, George learned a sturdy, but by no means uncritical,
appreciation of the market a s a social arbiter, and from his travels
around the world he developed an instinct for comparative social
analysis.
The glue that held all this together was the Common Sense philosophy,
a product of the Scottish Enlightenment that permeated most of
American intellectual life in George's youth and early adulthood. In
its American manifestation, Common Sense stressed that ordinary people
are naturally endowed with the means to apprehend the world and
discover its modes of operation; it held, as well, that the web of
natural law that holds the universe together is fully internally
consistent, and that Nature's law corresponds with the moral law,
which all people are also equipped to understand. Common Sense was a
democratic philosophy par excellence, and George never deviated, as
his reform successors did, from the notion that a true political
economy must, as he put it in Progress and Poverty, "commend
itself to the perceptions of the great masses of men." Equipped
with these intellectual tools, George created a powerful and
accessible political economy that placed land at the nexus of all
economic relations.
Progress and Poverty succeeded as well as it did in the United
States not because masses of Americans suddenly developed an interest
in the wages fund theory or Ricardo' s theory of rent, but because the
book was so appealing on a cultural level. George's work resolved in a
mature synthesis some of the most troubling conflicts in
nineteenth-century American culture: the clash between evangelical
revelation and Enlightenment natural law; between Hamiltonian
institution-building and Jeffersonian anti-statism; between the
liberal ideal of personal freedom and the republican ethic of civic
responsibility; between the rights of labor and the rights of capital.
George achieved this synthesis mainly by defining a realm of social
property that could supply and protect social security without
violating the standards of liberal property theory.
When George's followers said that they had "seen the cat,"
they meant that George's work had resolved artificial conflicts
between fundamentally compatible ideas, and offered not merely a new
policy to support, but a philosophical totality, in short, a new way
of seeing the world. George's system offered, I think, the
best-articulated alternative to the form of liberalism that would
dominate twentieth-century reform. To me, this is how Henry George "made
history." I don't have time here to consider all of the
implications that might flow from thinking of George in this way. But
since the subject of this panel is where Georgism's future lies, I
thought it might be useful to consider briefly how its past
illuminates at least the present.
For the sake of argument, let's take Bill Clinton's State of the
Union claim that "the era of Big Government is over" as the
symbolic endpoint of American progressive liberalism (as I'll call
both the original Progressive movement and its successors in the New
Deal and Great Society). How well did George anticipate the weaknesses
of this model as we see them today?
The most striking characteristic of the contemporary Left, whether
moderate or radical, is its incoherence, and in particular its
inability to define a distinctive alternate political economy. Modern
dissent can point to various social outcomes which it desires or
deplores, but is much less acute when asked to describe any
fundamental process inherent to capitalist economic relations that
produces injustice. The virtual disappearance of functioning
non-capitalist societies has made it impossible for the Left to
temporize any longer over its inability to define a non-capitalist
economics. More immediately relevant to American liberalism's
intellectual turmoil, though, has been the decline of Keynesian
economics, which carried on the anti-laissez faire impetus that began
with the Progressives. Increasingly faced in recent decades with the
dominance of neo-classical, neo-conservative models within economics
and policy studies, liberals have either quibbled, in a very
constrained fashion, over the efficiency of markets or the role of "social
capital," or have abandoned economics altogether for historical
accounts of exploitation that foster remedies based on compensatory,
mandated social outcomes. Perhaps the closest thing to an ideological
core that modern progressive movements possess is the hope that allied
particular grievances, loosely held together through commitment to "diversity,"
can constitute an effective reform bloc.
By contrast, the most consistent single theme in Henry George's
reform career was his belief that movements for social renovation must
possess, and be true to, a coherent political economy. One phase of
his concern is evident in Progress and Poverty, where George
identified a specific mechanism underlying modern social distress. As
a reform leader, too, George constantly warned that merely aggregating
disaffected groups did not create viable movements; some larger
principle must hold the movement together in the face of both internal
and external pressures. George's famous purge of the socialists from
his United Labor Party in 1887, which later historians often
interpreted as a reactionary move, was grounded in this idea, as were
his less well-known critiques of the Knights of Labor, the Populists,
and the Bellamyites. George never solved the problem of how to keep "incongruous
elements" out without narrowing his movement's base. But George
did succeed in giving his program an intellectual tightness of the
type which, in the last generation, has served the Right so well.
Other than intellectual purity, what could a Georgist-derived social
ideology have provided that progressive liberalism did not? To me, the
central contribution of Georgism was its capacity, as one prominent
nineteenth-century single taxer put it, to "draw boldly and
unmistakably the line between that which of right belongs to the
community and that which properly belongs to the individual."
Georgism confronted the question of social property head-on,
suggesting that a cultural consensus regarding common needs could be
built on the distinction between natural resources and other forms of
property. Progressive liberalism, on the other hand, has treated the
subject of public property pragmatically at best and opportunistically
at worst, drawing up vaguely-defined areas of public interest and
submitting them to weak, ambiguous judicial and administrative review.
Whipsawed between a naive mythology of absolute property rights and an
unreliable system of state intervention, Americans today possess a
stunted and increasingly cynical conception of the public good. Modern
social reformers are unlikely to prosper until they can articulate a
more appealing rationale for social property and communal interest.
NIMBYism and the "takings" movement represent two
outgrowths of our confused treatment of public property, but far more
prominent in recent years, and far more deeply involved progressive
liberalism's decline, ha been questions of public finance. Here, too,
George offered a path not taken. George abhorred public debt, which,
wrote, rests "upon the preposterous assumption that one
generation may bind another", but, more distinctively, he also
sought structural means to balance social need with public revenue.
Whether the land value tax could (or can) sustain the demands of a
modern society is a question I will leave to economists: my point here
is that George recognized from the beginning as few of his reform
contemporaries did, that social programs are no more secure or
successful than the fiscal system that pays for them. Progressive
liberalism gave Americans a core of services and programs that retain
at least rough support today, but the disjointed system of public
finance that evolved over the twentieth century has proved to be the
Achilles heel of the modern welfare state. George, some times accused
of being a mere tinkerer with fiscal reform, in fact foresaw the
dangers of disconnecting social responsibility, as represented in
taxation from social rights, as embodied in entitlements and services.
I hope it will be clear that in raising these points, I don't wish to
contribute to the cult of a clairvoyant and faultless Henry George,
nor to deny that the progressive- liberal model has enjoyed a long run
of success and power. But I do suggest that that model has dominated
our sense of social reform for so long that returning to another, well
reasoned system of reform thought can help us see other paths to
social change that remain locked up in the liberal tradition.
I said earlier that in my view, Henry George made history by
providing his era's best-reasoned alternative to progressive-liberal
social policy. You have some history-making of your own on the agenda
today, and I don't want to keep you from it. I do hope, however, that
an invigorated historical interest in Henry George will aid you in
your work.
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