James seems to believe that Henry George was an advocate of socialism. I
don't know if he is familiar with The Science of Political Economy
published posthumously in 1898. They say "politics makes strange
bedfellows" and it is certainly true that many of the socialist
persuasion supported George in his two races for mayor of N.Y. But in
Chapter VII entitled Ineffectual Gropings he made clear his disdain for
Marxism and socialism.
In the Science of Political Economy George is critical of virtually all
the schools of economic thought he was aware of at the time including
the Austrian which he called a "pseudo-science" and "if it has any
principles, I have been utterly unable to find them." See Chapter VIII
entitled The Scholastic Breakdown. Actually, the whole text of some 528
pp should be studied by anyone who is interested in more than a
superficial critique of his views.
Incidentally, I believe Marx somewhere referred to George's economic
analysis as "the capitalists last ditch."
Under the name of socialism, a name which all such movements have now
succeeded in appropriating, all such plans are embraced. We sometimes
hear of "scientific socialism," as something to be established, as it
were, by proclamation, or by act of government. In this there is a
tendency to confuse the idea of science with that of something purely
conventional or political, a scheme or proposal, not a science. For
science, as previously explained, is concerned with natural laws, not
with the proposal of man -- with relations which always have existed and
always must exist. Socialism takes no account of natural laws, neither
seeking them nor striving to be governed by them. It is an art or
conventional scheme like any other scheme in politics or government,
while political economy is an exposition of certain invariable laws of
human nature. The proposal which socialism makes is that the
collectivity or state shall assume the management of all means of
production, including land, capital and man himself; do away with all
competition, and convert mankind into two classes, the directors, taking
their orders from government and acting by governmental authority, and
the workers, for whom everything shall be provided, including the
directors themselves. It is a proposal to bring back mankind to the
socialism of Peru, but without reliance on divine will or power. Modern
socialism is in fact without religion, and its tendency is atheistic. It
is more destitute of any central and guiding principle than any
philosophy I know of. Mankind is here; how, it does not state; and must
proceed to make a world for itself, as disorderly as that which Alice in
Wonderland confronted. It has no system of individual rights whereby it
can define the extent to which the individual is entitled to liberty or
to which the state may go in restraining it. And so long as no
individual has any principle of guidance it is impossible that society
itself should have any. How such a combination could be called a
science, and how it should get a following, can be accounted for only by
the "fatal facility of writing without thinking," which the learned
German ability of studying details without any leading principle permits
to pass, and by the number of places which such a bureaucratic
organization would provide. However, through government repression and
its falling in with trade-union notions it has made great headway in
Germany, and has taken considerable hold in England.
Roy Davidson
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