Henry George
and Modern Philosophic Thought

George Raymond Geiger

[An address before the Chicago Single Tax Club. At the time, George R. Geiger was Professor of the Department of Philosophy, the Bradley Technological Institute, Peoria, Illinois. Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June 1929]

MR. TOASTMASTER and fellow-followers of Henry George, I am glad to be with you tonight and I assure you that I fully appreciate the honor you confer upon me in making me your guest of the evening.

I'm not quite sure whether I should bring you greetings from Peoria or from New York City. From my brief visits to Chicago, I am under the impression that both of these places, if not unpopular, are at least somewhat non-grata in your town; one, I suppose, because it might remind you of the type of small, mid-western village from which Chicago has been graduated at least in size and the other because it is more successful in keeping its crime waves out of the news columns. But I think that, as far as our movement is concerned, I'll cast my allegiance out here (no, not in the west ; I used to think that this was the west, but I have had it recently impressed upon me that it is not); anyway, I believe that out 'here in the north central regions there is still hope for you, while I'm afraid that we in the east are beyond redemption.

I don't want to appear, however, to be over-emphasizing any note of discouragement. On the contrary, there is much justification for encouragement. That is a good old bromide and one that I've heard at every Single Tax dinner, but I should like to attempt in a small measure to justify that statement, not by an reference to the actual progress of our work throughout the world you have read and heard enough of that but merely by a reference to a very significant pronouncement on the part of a scholar who is undoubtedly America's and perhaps the world's foremost thinker and philosopher, a man whose name is indeed one to conjure with. I refer, of course, to Professor John Dewey. I am quite certain that all of you have read his preface of appreciation to Prof. Brown's abridgement of "Progress and Poverty," and I believe also that you have heard that he has permitted his name to appear as a member of the advisory committee of the Henry George Foundation.

I am not going to attempt to estimate the impetus that the name of Professor Dewey will give to our movement in academic circles where up to now Henry George has been so inexcusably disregarded, but his influence is sure to be a very significant one. However, I realize that the reputation the academic world has acquired regarding its lack of permeability to ideas originating outside of its own dominions, may too well be substantiated. But the academic world must and will be affected by Professor Dewey's words and "Progress and Poverty" will be discussed in places where now it is not even a name.

So this evening I should like very briefly to emphasize what I think are the reasons for and the significance of Professor Dewey's interest in the work of Henry George. Note, I do not say the reasons why he (using the words in quotation marks) is a Single Taxer. To tell the truth, despite the fact that I have the great privilege of working under Professor Dewey in fact, of writing my doctor's dissertation on the "philosophy of Henry George" under his direction I can't see fit to label him a Single Taxer or anything else, for that matter, except a great liberal and a great progressive. You know, there are Single Taxers and Single Taxers. There are those and it is well that there is a great number of them who hold that the proposals of Henry George alone are sufficient to introduce a new order of society in which the golden age will be realized. There are those and I suppose my father is an example who are even more than Utopians, actually fanatics, "the dervish howling in the wilderness," as I believe my father has been characterized. Then there are those who are attracted by the ideals, the vision, the philosophy of Henry George, but who do not pay very much attention to his specific proposals. And there are those who are interested in the single tax merely because they find in it a scientific and efficient scheme of taxation, who regard it as nothing more than a fiscal, administrative change in government finance. And, of couise, there are still other approaches to Henry George. So even if I did feel that I could designate Professor Dewey as a "Single Taxer," I would not know in which category to place him. I hardly think that he believes the Single Tax to be a panacea for all our mortal ills, and I am quite as certain that he is more than the mere "tax reformer." But putting aside this matter of attempting to label or pigeon-hole a thinker such as John Dewey, I should like, as I said, to mention just a few of the factors that make it possible for the economics of Henry George to be correlated with a philosophy such as pragmatism that typical American school of thought which Prof. Dewey has been so largely instrumental in developing.

I don't of course, intend to bore you with any technical discussion of philosophy, but I do believe that it is important to understand some of the specific implications that may be considered significant in linking the work of Henry George with that of pragmatism. First of all, while it is the height of injustice to attempt to give any brief and superficial definition of a movement such as pragmatism, let me say that the pragmatic approach to philosophy and by philosophy I mean whatever is called up in your mind by the name is one which is attempting to remove philosophy from its other-wordly, sacrosanct, metaphysical position that it has held all through the history of intellectual enterprise, and to place it where it will be as helpful in solving the real problems of mankind as are the sciences. Philosophy has always concerned itself with questions of ultimate reality and ultimate truth, with problems of the validity of knowledge and thought as abstract categories, with attempts to deal with the metaphysical relations between man and the universe. In fact, philosophy has meant nothing more or nothing less than the elaborate and technical discussion of such problems, and when I suggested that by philosophy I mean whatever is called up in your mind by the word, I am quite sure that some such conception was the one that came before you.

Now, stating that pragmatism is endeavoring to change that traditional emphasis is not to be interpreted by any means as an attempt to cast any aspersions upon such typically, or rather traditionally philosophic enterprises; that certainly would evince a small and unappreciative grasp of the history of human thought. But pragmatists, by their attack upon traditional philosophy mean that human speculation, if it is to be significant and operative and something more than academic and scholastic logic-chopping, must concern itself with the problems of the here and now. Perhaps the entire absorption of philosophy into metaphysics and epistemology was quite appropriate for days in which theology and a mythological psychology were all-important, but men now are concerned with other problems, with problems of social adjustment, of political change, of economic balance, and philosophy, if it is to be at all instrumental, must directly attack such problems, ally itself to the sciences directly and experimentally, and turn its back upon the fascinating yet largely fruitless discussions philosophy. Pragmatism is asking philosophy to come down from its ivory tower, is asking that the philosopher come out of his closet and his arm-chair. For many, such a demand means the very annihilation of philosophy, but such a charge has terrors only for those who hold that philosophy must always be defined in medieval terms.

To phrase this general thought in another way, pragmatism holds that philosophy is in error not in its solutions of problems, but in the problems themselves. In the words of Professor Dewey, the pragmatic effort "may be looked upon as an attempt to forward the emancipation of philosophy from too intimate and exclusive attachment to traditional problems. It is not in intent a criticism of various solutions that have been offered, but raises a question as to the genuineness, under the present conditions of science and social life, of the problems." Philosophy has clung to old problems, to artificial problems, and new issues have been disregarded. Philosophy has not sufficiently concerned itself with contemporary difficulties, and, (for pragmatism,) that is the reason why philosophy has achieved the reputation for being old and artifical itself, a reputation that makes it something impractical, abstract, a trifle doddering and senile. "Unless professional philosophy," Profesor Dewey warns, "can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in the clarification and redirection of men's thoughts, it is likely to get more and more side-tracked from the main currents of contemporary life."

I do not like to use the usual phrases in describing this phase of pragmatism, those which state that pragmatism is philosophy made practical, that pragmatism judges a philosophic conception by the measure in which it works I say I don't like to use such descriptions because if not understood in their proper setting, they may give a very banal and plumber-like connotation to what is really a profound philosophical contribution. If, however, we interpret the words "practical" and "workable" as meaning the necessity of making philosophy and reason and intelligence efficient instruments in achieving some worthwhile end, then the words really serve their purpose.

But after this perhaps too long excursion into the general significance or approach of pragmatism, let us see more specifically what relation this has to Henry George. I believe that you do see now what sort of a relation it must be. One, if not the greatest, of problems that contemporary society has to face is that of the economic maladjustment that is so obviously a part of our present social order. We do have progress and poverty, wealth and want, misery, vice, crime, and all the pathological symptoms of a diseased structure. Here is a problem that cannot be put aside, that refuses to allow itself to be ignored, and yet philosophy has ignored it. It is one of those problems, those contemporary difficulties, that pragmatism insists must be recognized by philosophy, if philosophy is to have any real significance.

Of course, if we translate the problem of social and economic maladjustment into the terms of a more abstract vocabulary, and call it the problem of evil, then certainly philosophy, under its great divisions of moral and ethical theory, has concerned itself with such a problem. But how? Chiefly by attempting to explain away often even to justify evil by calling it some form of good in disguise, by making it merely the shadows in a great cosmic landscape, the discords which contribute to the grand and eternal harmony of things. That's no way to solve a problem of evil, no way to attack such a direct, work-a-day, practical if you will problem of the poverty, crime, vice, disease, which make up what we mean by evil.

Philosophy traditionally had discussed evil but has not attempted to do anything about it; now, however, to quote Professor Dewey, "the problem of evil ceases to be a theological and metaphysical one, and is perceived to be the practical problem of reducing, alleviating, as far as may be removing, the evils of life. Philosophy is no longer under obligation to find ingenious methods for proving that evils are only apparent, not real, or to elaborate schemes for explaining them away, or, worse yet, for justifying them. It assumes another obligation: That of contributing in however humble a way to methods that will assist us in discovering the causes of humanity's ills." And again: "Morally, men are now concerned with the amelioration of the conditions of the common lot in this world."

That word "morally" in the last quotation more directly introduces the thought that I am trying to emphasize. I realize that if technical, professional philosophy is to concern itself with our present diseased social and economic structure, the problem must be phrased not in social or economic terms, but in moral ones. But right here is a major difficulty. Philosophy has traditionally kept the realms of morals, or ethics, and of economics separate, in air-tight compartnents, carefully insulated (to change the metaphor) one from the other. A dualism has been set up, and the moral order has been not only divorced from the problems of economics that is the problems involved in man's efforts to satisfy his material wants, to make a "living" it has been made superior to such lower affairs, and has often been given authority over what was regarded as a cruder and less abstract realm. Moral ends have been exalted, and the means to those ends have been neglected. The noble concepts of Right and Duty, of Virtue and the Good, have been raised by moral philosophy as the ideals and goals of life, and little attention has been paid to the methods of reaching those ends. There has been a dialectical separation of "higher," as applied to moral matters, and "lower" as applied to economic, or, if you prefer, practical affairs. It has not been recognized that before men can live well or nobly, they must just live, and that before ideals can be realized there are wants that must be satisfied.

If there is one thing that pragmatism, and particularly Professor Dewey in his ethical works, has attacked, it is just this conception of a divorce between moral ends and the means chiefly economic to those ends. Morality, social morality that is, the desire for a society that wil realize some of the ideals and aspirations of men, can func tion only if it is to be related to something fundamenta and tangible. There is nothing more fundamental to the life of man than the earth itself, nothing more tangibl than the fact that all of mankind's needs come from lane Henry George has disclosed the means whereby mankind can come into possession of the land and distribute equitably the products of the earth. It is for philosophy now to show that moral considerations are dependent on fundamental economic adjustments.

It was George's really great fusion of economics an morals that, I believe, has attracted the attention of pragmatist such as Professor Dewey. Here in "Progres and Poverty" was a scathing, passionate indictment our existing social structure, and a vision of a new orde of things in which man's ethical ideals might be realiz but it was not merely an indictment and a vision and hope. There have been visions ever since the days of the prophets. Here in "Progress and Poverty" was a penetrating and profound realization of an economic maladjustment, a maladjustment that was crushing out the very life of society, but this was more than an economic treatise. There have been many of them. The two were joined in Henry George; the criticism of society and the hope for a higher social order were not merely pious protestations they were directly linked to something that pointed to the cause of the diseased conditions and showed the way to change them.

The necessity for the joining of economic means to moral ends may seem quite obvious, but I can assure you that the separation of the two has been a characteristic philosophic tradition; and therefore George's synthesis must have its appeal to those who realize the fundamental weakness and contradiction in such a separation. George's ultimate interests and ideals were dominantly ethical; his immediate concerns were economic but between "ultimate" and "immediate" there was no chasm. He realized implicity, if not explicitly, (for by no stretch of the imagination can George be termed a pragmatist his philosophic background and, more particularly his personal approach to matters of religion and philosophy were entirely alien to much of later pragmatic thought) that ends removed from means were "meaningless"; they were something set out in a great and aloof void and carefully protected from contact and corruption. Also that means removed from ends were inadequate, inoperative, undirected. I need not here work out in detail the direct correlation between our present social conditions and our system of property in land; that would be gratuitous in a gathering of Single Taxers. And besides, I have no intention of talking single tax economics this evening there are too many authorities present.

I wish merely to suggest this evening that this one element in Henry George's thought, the fusion of ends and means, of morals and economics, an element which may not appear to Single Taxers to be the most important in the work of George, has, I feel, the most fundamental and ideational appeal for a movement such as pragmatism. These sentences from Professor Dewey's preface to the "Significant Paragraphs from 'Progress and Poverty" will perhaps illustrate what I have been trying to emphasize here: "I do not say these things in order to vaunt his (George's) place as a thinker in contrast with the merits of his proposals for a change in methods of distributing the burdens of taxation. To my mind the two things go together. His clear intellectual insight into social conditions, his passionate feeling for the remediable ills from which humanity suffers, find their logical conclusion in his plan for liberating labor and capital from the shackles which now bind them. ...There have been economists of great repute who in their pretension to be scientific have ignored the most significant elements in human nature. There have been others who were emotionally stirred by social ills and who proposed glowing schemes of betterment, but who passed lightly over facts. It is the thorough fusion of insight into actual facts and forces, with recognition of their bearing upon what makes human life worth living, that constitutes Henry George one of the world's great social philosophers."