John Dewey and Henry George: The Socialization of Land as a Prerequisite for a Democratic Public

• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• Author: Christopher England
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12217

John Dewey and Henry George:

The Socialization of Land as a Prerequisite

for a Democratic Public

By CHRISTOPHER ENGLAND*

ABSTRACT. John Dewey frequently praised Henry George, author of a

plan to confiscate land values with a “single tax.” Scholars have failed

to account for Dewey’s support of George. Some have argued that it

should not be taken seriously because it is at odds with their

interpretation of Dewey’s philosophy. This article demonstrates that

Dewey perceived the socialization of land values as an essential step

toward creating a true democracy. Furthermore, Dewey’s interest in

George was not an aberration; it was exemplary of his faith in ideology,

theory, and transformative social policy. Despite contentions to the

contrary, pragmatists of the early 20

th

century never emphasized

skepticism, moderation, or rote empiricism. In fact, Dewey embraced

the philosophy of Henry George as a general theory of history of

society. During the Great Depression, Dewey attacked the piecemeal

reformism of the New Deal in favor of the comprehensive vision of

Henry George.

Introduction

Just reviewing the titles of John Dewey’s biographies ought to make it

evident that he enjoys a singular place in the pantheon of American

philosophers, particularly on the topicof democracy. He is, by this met-

ric, “The Founder of American Liberalism,” “America’s Philosopher of

Democracy,” and the “Philosopher of a New Age” (Casil 2006; Fott

1988; Otto 1937). Some of those assessments might be hyperbolic. Alan

Ryan has argued persuasively that Dewey’s views were never, in fact,

*PhD in U.S. History from Georgetown University. Experience includes: fellow at

the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, instructor at the University of Wisconsin at

Madison, and researcher at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Email: Christopher.

England@Wisconsinhistory.org

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 1 (January, 2018).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12217

V

C2018 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

near the mainstream of American politics (1995). However, Dewey’s

application of pragmatism to politics and education undoubtedly

helped reimagine the intellectual foundations of American liberalism in

the first half of the 20

th

century.

Henry George, on the other hand, hardly enjoys the same acclaim.

George ([1879] 1886) argued, most famously in Progress and Poverty,

that private ownership of land was at the root of inequality and posed

an existential threat to democracy. George has, especially in recent

years, received positive mention from leading economists like Joseph

Stiglitz (2012: 266) and even the eminently respectable Economist mag-

azine (Lucas 2015). In the humanities, however, George’s status has not

risen much since a study of him that concluded he did not belong in

the field of intellectual history because he was “too eccentric and

apparently unserious” (Yanosky1993: x).

Predictably then, scholars have had difficulty accounting for the

remarkably high regard in which Dewey held George. Dewey most

famously wrote that George “is one of the great names among the

world’s social philosophers .... it would require less than the fingers of

the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato down rank with

him” (Dewey 1928: 1). One historian considered the claim so implausi-

ble that he cited it as evidence that contemporary attribution of signifi-

cance should not be regarded as a reliable category of evidence

(Campbell 1986: 343). Alan Ryan dismissed the claim as obviously not

representative because Dewey had a “sense of the intricacy of social

life and its and its unamiability to any single solution” (1995: 115).

While less extreme, Ryan’s claim amounts to much the same as the first.

If we disregard the claims of one of America’s most prominent philoso-

phers when we find them inconvenient, textual analysis amounts to lit-

tle more than projecting oneself onto our subjects. Some historians

have been less dismissive of the relationship between the two, but

none have accounted for Dewey’s interest. Martin Jay (2003), in his

biography of Dewey, often referenced Dewey’s interest in land value

taxation, but he did not engage in a substantive way with the origins or

extent of Dewey’s interest in the “single tax.”

Dismissing Dewey’s praise for George is more than just bad form; it

obscures important currents of his thought. Dewey could fairly be

described as a Georgist. Henry George’s ideas about the centrality of

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology170

land in social life are at the heart of much of Dewey’s social analysis.

Land value taxation was, for Dewey, a prerequisite to establishing a

“Public”—an organic community of face-to-face interactions that served

as the social foundation for any true democracy. Socializing the ground

on which our communities were built was a means for enriching minds

with direct personal “experience”—the foundation for Dewey’s peda-

gogical methodology. References to George and Georgist analysis are

interspersed throughout Dewey’s writings. Dewey actively campaigned

for land value taxation and was affiliated with Georgistorganizations.

Dewey’s interest in Henry George is more than a neglected facet of

his thought, it is a direct repudiation of leading interpretations of his

philosophy. For somescholars, pragmatism’s focus on historical context

and contingency is naturally antithetical to ideology. Richard Rorty

began the Consequences of Pragmatism by defining pragmatism as the

belief that no two truth claims had any bearing on each other; pragma-

tists believe that “certain acts [are] good ones to perform, under the cir-

cumstances, but doubt that there is anything general or useful to say

about what makes all good” (1982: xiii). In politics, this naturally meant

opposition to those who “claim that they have found The Secret that

make all things plain” (Rorty 1982: xl). Rorty believed pragmatism

implied that politics should be structured around individual “causes,”

rather than “movements”that see “everything as part of a pattern whose

center is that single thing” (1997: 117). Rorty remembers Dewey as a

contemporary of the New Deal, which experimented with a litany of

policies not (obviously) anchored in a coherent philosophy of govern-

ment. He forgets, however, that Dewey leveled trenchant critiques

against the New Deal for following precisely that course. Similarly,

James Kloppenberg (2011: xi–xii; 1986) argues that pragmatists “never

say dogmatically, in advance, that one policy or another follows neces-

sarily from the commitment to experimentation. Pragmatism is a philos-

ophy of skeptics.” Pragmatism is a philosophy that repudiates ideology

for a “culture of democratic decision-making,” defined by compromise

between the diverse interest groups that develop under the umbrella of

a democratic society.

There have been many scholars who rejected this argument that

Dewey should be identified with piecemeal reformism. Richard Bern-

stein (1991: 233) attacked Rorty’s pragmatism as “an apologia for the

John Dewey and Henry George 171