Few thinkers have suffered a short-changing as severe in proportion to the profundity of their ideas as Henry George. Long dismissed by historians as one of many panacea peddlers who sought a return to a mythic time of antebellum opportunity during the Gilded Age, George has experienced a small wave of renewed interest over the past decade. At the crest of this wave is Christopher England’s Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism, which, to deal in superlatives, is arguably the finest historical work on George since his death in 1897. Bearing in mind such worthy contributions as the George biographies by Henry George, Jr., and Charles A. Barker, as well as recent contributions like that of Edward T. O’Donnell, this is no small praise, nor, in light of a few problems with the book, is it idle.Footnote 1 With Land and Liberty, England has sought to expand our understanding of Henry George beyond his plan for land value taxation through the “single tax” and to identify for him and the wider Georgist movement a place in the transformation of liberal ideology at the turn of the century.
In pursuit of this mission, England blends past approaches to George and the single tax movement by presenting a composite narrative of George’s ideological roots, his life, and then the course and major accomplishments of the post-George movement. While this basic model has precedent in Arthur Young’s early history, England innovates by turning his attention to George’s holistic worldview, which he summarizes as liberal “egalitarian democracy,” to uncover overlooked Georgist legacies (37).Footnote 2 Additionally, he incorporates the contributions of more recent scholarship and extends his analysis through the New Deal to address more contemporary concerns, all the while drawing deeply from his own reading of primary sources. Such a vast scope—ranging from Adam Smith to the Federal Housing Administration—requires strict discipline and economy of expression in a narrative of only 270 pages. England accomplishes this feat adroitly, covering George’s life in about seventy pages before treating the deeds of his disciples like Tom L. Johnson, Louis F. Post, and George Creel. In sequence, the reader is carried through George’s place in liberal political economy; the formation and publication of George’s written thought; George’s efforts to shape practical politics; the influence of his ideas on a generation of reformers and the formation of the loose single tax movement; and major instances of Georgist influence in municipal reform, land and resource conservation policy, and the Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.
While England’s analysis is incisive and subtle at each step, two chapters are demonstrative: “The Truths of Smith and Proudhon” and “Seeing the Cat.” In the former, England illustrates how George rescued the “democratic and egalitarian strand of liberalism” from its Malthusian and Darwinian dead ends by identifying that the cause of poverty “was a function of political design, not genetic essentialism” (36, 43). In identifying society’s role in producing land values, and their malappropriation through private rent, George made a case both for socializing public services (land, transportation, utilities, and so forth) and the progressive role of urban life. England sees this reinterpretation of poverty as environmental, not moral or genetic, as the basis of the welfare state. In this process and throughout the book, England teases out the essential Georgist liberal distinction between public and private spheres, as opposed to the contemporary “progressive” regulation that blurred the two.
In “Seeing the Cat” and his other chapters on single-taxer influences, England plows some of the freshest ground. He assesses the quasi-religious aspect of becoming a single taxer and the difficulty in tracing direct influences on account of George’s opposition to formal organization. His recovery of Post’s role, and the interaction of Georgists with more famous reformers like Bryan and Addams, is especially gratifying (122–42). From his discussion of Georgism’s free-trade insurgency in the Democratic Party to its role in presidential policy, England shifts emphasis away from the particularity of land ownership and toward more general precepts that stem from it. While England’s immersion in the Georgist worldview is always impressive, his eagerness to relate George’s movement to modern liberalism is both the book’s strength and weakness. Attention gradually moves from the idealistic substance of Georgism toward its more pragmatic, derivative fruits. Indeed, England, not unlike his more recent predecessors, sees Georgism as a useful “link in a chain” or temporary “midpoint” to see liberalism safely through a stormy period, not a desirable end in and of itself (6, 266).
My two significant criticisms of Land and Liberty deal with omissions in England’s framework for understanding George’s role in the “salvaging” of liberalism (51, 267). First, engagement with O’Donnell’s latest work, at least in the otherwise excellent notes, would have been appropriate. Though O’Donnell’s focus is narrower, and his preferred paradigm is republicanism, his basic thesis of George’s rescuing the best of old republicanism and challenging of laissez-faire to open a path for the new republicanism (social democracy) is quite similar to England’s liberal formulation. While England cites O’Donnell’s dissertation on working-class politics, O’Donnell’s book is eight years old, expands his argument, and, as the most obvious compeer of England, deserves attention (289–90).Footnote 3
The more significant problem is the curious silence at the back of the analysis: England never really defines modern liberalism, which George is supposed to have played a part in crafting. This absence fosters a sometimes-squishy argument that appeals to talismans like “language of equal rights,” “widespread property ownership,” and “modern welfare state,” while drawing an overly sharp distinction against bureaucratic-minded “academic Progressives” with regard to the ancestry of modern liberalism (5–7, 45, 48–49, 51). If George’s rights rhetoric and criticism of the market resonate with modern liberalism, so, too, does the progressive academy, regulation, and bureaucracy. Roosevelt’s “pure democracy” sounds more modernly liberal than George’s more libertarian passages and his dismissal of subsidies, regulation, and expert opinion. And the modern welfare state may owe as much to Otto von Bismarck as to Henry George. George did not seek wider real estate ownership; he sought land nationalization, which England himself makes clear. While George did represent a profound evolution in liberal thought, England’s careful exposition of George’s dedication to rational, foundational principles seems instead to illustrate how different the substantive thinking of modern liberals (and conservatives, for that matter) is from George. Rights were not rhetorical for George. They were fundamental, universal realities. George was a man of absolutes, and, for better or worse, there is little that is modern (or postmodern) about absolutes. Though England admirably wishes to reverse a trend of “condescension,” his assessment that Georgists who turned to conservatism in the New Deal, like Creel and Raymond Moley, merely proved Georgism was “important” but “not necessarily sufficient” to saving liberalism suggests that he values Georgism for its preferred fruits, not its own substance (8, 257–67).
Nevertheless, my criticisms target only the crust of a delectable sandwich. The substance of Land and Liberty stands proudly on its own merits and demands a revision of American political historiography.
