Spencer Heath Archive

Item 739

Penciling on lined notepad paper

No date

 

 

 

     In his last and maturest volumes, Science of Political Economy, Henry George at the outset is at great pains to develop, as a foundation premise, the idea that civilized mankind is

“… a social body, a larger entity, which has a life and character of its own, and continues its existence while its components change … It is in this social body, this larger entity, of which individuals are the atoms, that the extensions of human power which mark the advance of civilization are secured. … This Greater Leviathan is to the political structure or conscious commonwealth what the unconscious functions of the body are to the conscious activities. It is not made by pact and covenant; it grows, as the tree grows, as the man himself grows, by virtue of natural laws inherent in human nature and in the constitution of things; and the laws which it in turn obeys, though their manifestations may be retarded or prevented by political action, are themselves utterly independent of it … Civilization is evidently a relation which underlies the relations of the body politic as the unconscious motions of the body underlie the conscious motions. … And from this relation of dependence upon the body economic, the body politic can never become exempt.”

     This is a vastly higher and more intelligent approach to the study of social phenomena than was taken in his earliest work. There he was concerned not with society itself, not with the modes of working of the social organization but with its failure to work, not with the functioning of the social organism but with the frustration and failure of its functioning, of its becoming defunct, not with how it prospers and lives but with how it languishes and dies.

     And preliminary to his premeditated attack on the institution of property in land which he assumed from the start to be anti-social in its operation and effect, he took occasion to attack systematically the intellectual errors of his predecessors as though to transfer the blood-guilt — the responsibility for social evils — from all other causes or arrangements of things and fasten it indelibly upon the brow of the one great social institution that it was his chosen mission to condemn.

     But in this intellectual house cleaning he was far from impartial. The Ricardian diagram of an assumed increasing insufficiency of the earth for the needs of a growing society was uncritically endorsed and retained, despite its obvious parallelism to the Malthusian fallacy that our author had so completely exposed.

     This change of attitude and approach reflected a similar improvement in the author’s material affairs. The earlier work with its pathological point of view was written under the cloud of a galling poverty and personal distress. But in the intervening decade or more his oratorical powers had won for him almost a world-wide acclaim as well as affluent friends who were happy to subsidize his pen. This doubtless accounts for the relaxed emotional bonds and greater intellectual freedom with which he set out upon his final and important . .

                                      /Breaks off/