Henry George and Europe

Abstract

Abstract. In the eyes of European scholars, publicists and politicians who studied Henry George's work, he, as a social philosopher, had adopted the position of the natural law philosophers of the 18th century. The latter inspired the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, as well as the poiitical philosophy of Jeffersonian democracy, the ethos of the 18th and 19th century pioneer settlers. George rejected Social Darwinism. He saw natural law as the only true and reliable basis for a just social order. Like Karl Marx he mastered Ricardian economics; unlike Marx, George made two factors the basis of his system, labor and land. George saw that each person had a natural right—and a natural imperative for survival—to apply his or her productive capacity to the earth–as living space and as storehouse of nutrients and raw materials. The person‐land relationship, he discovered, lay at the basis of human culture. And so the land's rent, now monopolized by the few, had to be appropriated to meet the needs of society, most efficiently and justly by a land value tax.