Leo Tolstoy and Henry George

Peter Poole

[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, July-August 1987]

LEO TOLSTOY was an anarchist. He believed that fundamental Christian ethics based on love and non-violence were sufficient to regulate man's activities. This enabled the Communists, led by Lenin, to paint the great author as an idealist who had little to say about practical affairs.

In fact, Tolstoy campaigned hard during the last 25 years of his life - he died in 1910 - for reforms which he considered to be eminently practical. At the heart of his proposals was a change in Russia's land tenure and tax systems. He wanted a Single Tax on land values, a fiscal policy which ha adopted from American social reformer, Henry George, whose books he first read in 1886. Tolstoy commended the reform to the Tsars, claiming that the Single Tax would abolish the conditions creating civil unrest.

Tolstoy realised that his proposal entailed minimal government - which contradicted his heart-felt preference for no government at all. His friend and translator, Aylmer Maude, noted the apparent contradiction. But Tolstoy had an answer: "The great majority of people still believe in governments and legality - then let them, at least, see that they get good laws, he declared."

Maud wrote: "It appears to him utterly wrong that we should maintain laws which will make those who work the land in the next generation, dependent on a small number who will be born possessed of the land. That a few of the strongest, cleverest, or most grasping of the labourers may meanwhile succeed in becoming landlords does not mend matters.

AFTER one of his short trips back to England, Aylmer Maude was asked by Tolstoy to report on the progress being made towards adopting Henry George's reforms.

Maud later recorded* the conversation:

He asked me... how the single-tax movement was getting on. I said that I thought it was a small movement not making much way.

"How is that, when the question is one of such enormous importance?" Tolstoy asked.

I said I thought that the great majority of Englishmen were too conservative to attend to it, and the Socialists and other advanced parties had gone past Henry George and recognised interest, and private property in the means of production, as being also wrong.

"That is a pity," said Tolstoy. "If the Conservatives are too conservative to attend to it, and the advanced parties have gone past it, who is to do this work that so urgently needs doing?"

* Quoted from Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy and his Problems. London: Constable (1902?)