Read complete books and articles on: Henry George

George, Henry - 1839–97, American economist, founder of the single tax movement, b. Philadelphia. Of a poor family, his formal education was cut short at 14, and in 1857 he emigrated to California; there he worked at various occupations before turning to newspaper writing in San Francisco. George's experience in a number of trades, his desperate poverty while supporting a family, and the examples of financial rapacity that came to his attention as wage earner and newspaperman gave impetus to his reformist tendencies. George believed that an increase in poverty accompanied and even surpassed the increase in national wealth. He believed that the answer to this seeming paradox lay in the fact that the rental of land and the unearned increase in land values profited a few individuals rather than the community whose existence made the land valuable. He believed that a single tax on land would meet all the costs of government and even leave a surplus, besides unburdening labor and capital of taxes on their output. He first outlined the doctrine in the pamphlet Our Land and Land Policy (1871) and set himself to write a more elaborate treatise, which appeared under the title Progress and Poverty (1879); it sold millions of copies all over the world. In 1880 George moved to New York City and spent the remainder of his life writing and lecturing. He supported the Irish Land League and various economic and political reforms. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York on a reform platform, and the incumbent Tammany machine was forced to go outside its ranks to find in Abram S. Hewitt a man strong enough to oppose him. Hewitt won, but George, without a party organization, polled a heavy vote, running ahead of the Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt. In 1897 George ran again but died just before the election. Clear presentation and moral fervor rather than originality make George's ideas outstanding. His theories have influenced tax legislation in Australia, in parts of Canada, in the United States, and in certain nations of Western Europe.

See biography by Henry George, Jr. (1900); studies by A. A. G. DeMille (1950, repr. 1972), S. B. Cord (1965), E. J. Cord (1965), and J. Oser (1973).

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10 of the Best Books and Articles on: Henry George

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1.

The Life of Henry George » Read Now
by Henry George Jr. 638 pgs.

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...THE LIFE OF HENRY GEORGE BY HIS SON HENRY JR. GEORGE...ILLUSTRATIONS HENRY GEORGE AT ABOUT FIVE. FROM DAGUERREO TYPE...DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN ABOUT THE TIME THAT HENRY GEORGE...
2.

The Philosophy of Henry George » Read Now
by George Raymond Geiger. 581 pgs.

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...THE PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY GEORGE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK...City, in 1897. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY GEORGE BY GEORGE RAYMOND GEIGER, PH...for having aroused my interest...
3.

Henry George in the British Isles » Read Now
by Elwood P. Lawrence. 208 pgs.

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...Henry George in the British Isles Henry George in the British Isles by Elwood P. Lawrence The Michigan...band still devoted to the single tax would greet the name of Henry...
4.

Pioneers of American Economic Thought in the Nineteenth Century » Read Now
by Ernest Teilhac, E. A. J. Johnson. 187 pgs.

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...as represented in America by Henry George, really end by establishing a...III. THE SOCIAL ECONOMICS OF HENRY GEORGE 114 Section I: Life, General Ideas, and Method of Henry...
5.

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; the Remedy » Read Now
by Henry George. 568 pgs.

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6.

Social Problems » Read Now
by Henry George. 260 pgs.

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7.

The Land Question: Property in Land, the Condition of Labor » Read Now
by Henry George. 151 pgs.

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8.

A Perplexed Philosopher: Being an Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Various Utterances on the Land Question, with Some Incidental Reference to His Synthetic Philosophy » Read Now
by Henry George. 330 pgs.

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9.

The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chap. Four "The Postbellum Crisis of Political Economy: Henry George and William Graham Sumner") » Read Now
by Jeffrey Sklansky. 313 pgs.

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Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism.
For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of...
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Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism.
For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers charged that a propertyless populace was incompatible with true liberty and democracy.
Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists devised a new science of American society that came to be called "social psychology." The change Sklansky charts begins among Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continues through the polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham Sumner, and culminates with the pioneers of modern American psychology and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Together, these writers reconceived freedom in terms of psychic self-expression instead of economic self-interest, and they redefined democracy in terms of cultural kinship rather than social compact.
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10.

Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America ("Utopian Radicalism: Henry George and Edward Bellamy" begins on p. 218) » Read Now
by Rush Welter. 480 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library