Modern Economic Classics-Evaluations Through Time

Bernard S. Katz, Ronald E. Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351982382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this book, first published in 1988, the editors have included the reviews of thirteen classic works on economic theory, empirical economic studies, political economy and management. Each major work was chosen due to its contribution in shaping our current knowledge and perspectives, and each essay is commented on by important critics in different eras. This title will be of interest to students of economic thought.

Progress and Poverty

by Henry George

Review: Editorial Staff (1883)^*

There has been a strong disposition among certain English critics to regard Mr. George as though he were nothing more than a charlatan, and to think, upon that ground, that a passing sneer will dispose of him. In both these views we consider them wholly wrong; but even were the first of them never so well founded, we should fail to see in it the least support for the second. Were Mr. George’s subject mathematics or Biblical prophecy, then no doubt the case would be widely different. An ingenious writer, not many years ago, maintained that the earth was shaped like a Bath bun; and another, that Mr. Gladstone was the real beast of the Revelation; but had Dr. Tyndall lectured against the first theory in Albermarle Street, or had Canon Farrar denounced the second at Westminster, we should have thought the distinguished critics about as wise as the men they criticized. We do not find a ‘Janus’ crossing swords with the Jumpers, nor the Astronomer Royal refuting Zadkiel’s Almanac. But though the Zadkiels and the Jumpers of abstract science and theology are for ever safe from any serious notice, and reach their highest honour when we sometimes condescend to smile at them, the moment they enter the domain of politics they become amenable to a new kind of tribunal.

Our meaning is not recondite. False theories, when they bear directly upon action, do not claim our attention in proportion to the talent they are supported by, but in proportion to the extent to which action is likely to be influenced by them; and since action in modern politics so largely depends on the people, the wildest errors are grave, if they are only sufficiently popular. How they strike the wise is a matter of small moment; the great question is, how they will strike the ignorant; and the modern politician, who disdains to discuss a doctrine merely because none but the very ignorant could be duped by it, acts much like a man who lets himself be knocked down by a burglar, because his honour will not permit him to fight any one but a gentleman. Thus it is easy to call Mr. George’s proposals ridiculous, and to say that his fallacies have been again and again refuted; but nothing is gained by these facile and futile sarcasms. For practical purposes no proposals are ridiculous unless they are ridiculous to the mass of those who may act upon them; in any question in which the people are powerful, no fallacy is refuted if the people still believe in it; and were Mr. George’s book even a lower class of production than it has ever been said to be by its most supercilious critics, we should not, for that reason, in the present condition of things, esteem it one jot less worthy of a full and candid analysis.

Let those who disagree with us consider the following facts. ‘Progress and Poverty,’ whatever its merits or its demerits, is remarkable first and foremost as containing one special proposal. This is a proposal, urged with the utmost plainness, for the wholesale and indiscriminate plunder of all landed proprietors. We say plunder, and we use the word advisedly; that, and that alone, will express Mr. George’s meaning. Other writers have again and again suggested that it would be well if the class in question could be bought out by the State; but Mr. George’s point is, that there shall be no buying in the matter. Let us not buy them out; let us simply use force and turn them out. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is a much more direct and easy way; nor is it right,’ he adds, ‘that there should be any concern about them.’ Now without pausing at present to comment on this teaching, let us ask simply what success it has met with. ‘Progress and Poverty’ has been published but for three years—for ‘three years in America, and in England’ only one. In America its sale was so large and rapid, that it had already gone through a hundred editions there, before it was known by so much as its name here; and here, though its circulation has been most probably smaller, its reception in some ways has been even more significant. In America the author, so far as we have been able to learn, has failed hitherto to make any practical converts. He has been more fortunate on this side of the Atlantic. One of the chiefs of the Irish Land League has become his enthusiastic disciple; and what was yesterday the mere aspiration of the thinker will probably tomorrow be the actual demand of the agitator. Nor is this all, or nearly all. Mr. George’s London publishers have lately reissued his book in an ultra-popular form. It is at this moment selling by thousands in the alleys and back streets of England, and is being audibly welcomed there as a glorious gospel of justice. If we may credit a leading Radical journal, it is fast forming a new public opinion. The opinion we here allude to is no doubt that of the half-educated; but this makes the matter in some ways more serious. No classes are so dangerous, at once to themselves and to others, as those which have learnt to reason, but not to reason rightly. They are able to recognize the full importance of argument, but not to distinguish a false argument from a true one. Thus any theory that serves to flatter their passions will, if only put plausibly, find their minds at its mercy. They will fall victims to it, as though to an intellectual pestilence. Mr. George’s book is full of this kind of contagion. A ploughman might snore, or a country gentleman smile over it, but it is well calculated to turn the head of an artizan.

This alone would suffice to give it a grave importance; but half of the story yet remains to be told. It is not the poor, it is not the seditious only, who have been thus affected by Mr. George’s doctrines. They have received a welcome, which is even more singular, amongst certain sections of the really instructed classes. They have been gravely listened to by a conclave of English clergymen. Scotch ministers and Nonconformist professors have done more than listen—they have received them with marked approval; they have even held meetings, and given lectures to disseminate them. Finally, certain trained economic thinkers, or men who pass for such in at least one of our Universities are reported to have said that they see no means of refuting them, and that they probably mark the beginning of a new political epoch.

It is easy to think too much of the importance of facts like these; it is equally easy to think far too little of them. It is to this latter extreme, we fear, that the Conservative party inclines; we have therefore no hesitation in putting our case strongly. We say once more, and with even greater emphasis, that were Mr. George’s arguments intrinsically never so worthless, were his knowledge never so slight, his character never so contemptible, his book has acquired an importance, from the special success it has met with, which would make it our duty to examine its widest falsehoods with the same attention we should give to the gravest truths.

We have other reasons, however, for taking Mr. George seriously. Our arguments thus far have supposed him to be a charlatan pure and simple; but we have supposed that for argument’s sake only. Our own judgment of him is something widely different. It is true, as we purpose presently to show in detail, that in all his main positions, he is as false to fact as the most cracked-brained astrologer, and as hostile to society in his proposals as the most malignant criminal; but in spite of this, he himself is neither criminal nor crack-brained. In tone and in moral method he betrays many faults and weaknesses. His self-conceit is inordinate, his temper is often petulant, his finer feelings are so tainted with self-consciousness, that he can rarely express them without striking an attitude; and his practical programme, as we have seen, is monstrous. None the less we believe that, in spite of all these defects, the intention he has started with is thoroughly pure and honest; and that, however his character may change for the worse hereafter, he is at present an unselfish philanthropist. He is the friend of the poor, he is not the enemy of the rich. He seeks to save, not to ruin civilization; and he almost equals a Czar or an English Tory in his hatred and horror of our modern proletarian anarchists. Morally, therefore, he fully deserves a hearing; and our condemnation of his doctrines, though it will certainly not be softened, will at least be accompanied by a certain respect for himself. What we have said of his character applies with equal force to his intellect. Grave as his errors are, they are the errors of a vigorous thinker; and he falls into delusions which most men would escape from, from perceiving arguments that most men would be blind to. It is indeed no exaggeration to say, that he uses more logical strength in floundering in the quicksands of falsehood, than has sufficed to carry others far up the rocks of truth. Should any reader, out of prejudice, be inclined to question this, let him turn aside from Mr. George’s main thesis, to the remarks he makes by the way, and to his handling of subsidiary subjects. We shall there find not only casual sentences which have all the terseness, and more than the truth of Hobbes; we shall find chapters also in which certain of the most cherished delusions of Radicalism are submitted to a keener and far more merciless criticism than they have ever met with since they began their wretched existence. Mr. George’s power will thus be at once apparent. In the strength with which he attacks one order of falsehoods, we shall learn the strength with which he supports another; and if the delusions to which he is himself a victim are greater and more dangerous than those over which he triumphs, this will only form the weightiest reason possible why we ourselves should try to dispel the former. The difficulty of the task is, we think, not equal to its importance. It has required greater skill on Mr. George’s part to see his way into his errors, than it will require on ours to see the way out of them.

If this be the case, however, it is but fair to Mr. George to acknowledge that, in some measure, we have his own talent to thank for it. His book is a model of logical and lucid arrangement. He shows us exactly what he wants to prove, and the exact steps by which he means to prove it. The track of his thought is thus so distinctly marked, that we can at once see where he stumbles or goes astray, or where he jumps instead of bridging a chasm. Half the ease we find in proving his meaning false is due to the clearness with which he shows what his meaning is.

The great problem which he attempts to solve is as follows: He starts with reminding us that the present century has been, so far as material progress goes, the most astonishing period in all of human history. Wealth has increased beyond the dreams of the alchemists. Science and industry have performed greater miracles than any foreseen by Bacon in his visions of the new Atlantis. Nor do the wonders show any signs of ceasing. Scarcely a week passes without some new achievement—some new invention which will minister to our comfort, or help us to escape from some immemorial evil. But there is an evil which, amidst all this progress, nothing touches, nothing seems to alleviate. On the contrary, it is growing daily greater; and, having long been a disgrace, it will soon be a menace to our civilization. That evil is the poverty of the industrial classes. It is true that, in some sense, the poor have been always with us; but never before were their numbers or their misery so great and so portentous as they are, or are fast becoming. ‘Material progress,’ says Mr. George, ‘does not merely fail to relieve poverty; it actually produces it’: and it can be seen to do so, he adds, under such varieties of local circumstance, that the fact in question is plainly no mere accident, but is bound up in some way with material progress itself. Here, he exclaims (we are quoting his own words), ‘is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring the 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 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.’ Mr. George in his present volume undertakes to answer it. He engages to show us, not only why poverty is connected with progress, but further, that the connection is not in any way necessary; that the evil is artificial, not natural; and that it is in our power almost at once to cure it…

“The Forgotten Man: Henry George”: George R. Geiger (1941)^*

One of the most curious anomalies of the entire literature of social reform has been the almost total neglect, even ignorance, in liberal and progressive circles of the work of Henry George. He is indeed the forgotten man, apparently the unmentionable. Try to find a reference to him in, say, the New Republic or the Nation. (Even the New Masses and the Daily Worker are a little more generous. Once in a while they remember his anniversaries and have some unaccountably charitable things to say about him.) This ignorance occasionally has ludicrous results. Not that George is confused by the allegedly literate with Lloyd George, but it’s almost as bad as that when Mr. George Catlin (certainly an alleged literate) writes in his rather recent Story of the Political Philosophers that the George Junior Republic in New York State—a colony for the young—was established as an outgrowth of Henry George’s work! Which is about the same as suggesting that Karl is one of those funny Marx Brothers, or that he helps run a men’s clothing chain with a couple of other fellows. A trivial point surely—possibly even a typographical error. ….Although, as some wag has put it, they can’t all be typographical errors. The omissions of George are not all inadvertent. There are reasons, then. What are they? The following catalogue is perhaps not complete, and it is certainly uneven, containing both good and bad reasons—and all of them insufficient ground for the neglectful contempt that our present-day intelligentsia professes towards George’s philosophy:

• He is connected with “the land question,” and that is out of date.
• He believed in a “single tax” which was to be a utopian panacea.
• He believed in classical economics.
• He believed in God.
• He has no standing in academic circles: it is not sophisticated to refer to Henry George as it is to mention Thorstein Veblen.

Look at the single taxers! They are all crackpots—vegetarians, theosophists, spiritualis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART ONE: ECONOMIC THEORY
• PART TWO: POLITICAL ECONOMY
• PART THREE: EMPERICAL ECONOMIC STUDIES
• PART FOUR: MANAGEMENT
• NAME INDEX