Principal Concepts in Henry George's Theory of Natural Law: A Brief Commentary on The Science of Political Economy

• Author: FRANCIS K. PEDDLE
• Published date: 01 October 2012
• Date: 01 October 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2012.00841.x

NATURAL LAW

Principal Concepts in Henry George’s

Theory of Natural Law: A Brief Commentary

on The Science of Political Economy

By FRANCIS K. PEDDLE*

ABSTRACT. George sees the obstruction of the interaction between the

active and passive factors of production, between the human and the

natural, or anything that exacerbates the dualism between us and

nature, as contrary to the functioning of political economy. His

deliberations on the nature of action and desire lead to his formulation

of the fundamental law of political economy. This essay elaborates on

the guiding principles of that law, examines its basis in light of

Ciceronian versus descriptive economics, considers its ramifications

for socio-political institutions and economic reform, and addresses the

question of social versus economic justice. The recognition of the

power of economic rent in the distribution of income and wealth has

once again made George’s philosophy of economics a guide for

reforms in public finance, the alleviation of poverty, and the long-term

stewardship of the environment.

Introduction—Natural Law and Political Economy

In Henry George’s last, unfinished work, The Science of Political

Economy, there is little discussion of politics, societies, legal institu-

tions, or what we now generally call public finance. Adam Smith

devotes Book V of The Wealth of Nations to issues of public revenue

and debt, and chapters 8 to 18 of David Ricardo’s Principles of

Political Economy and Taxation focus on the vicissitudes of what is

commonly referred to today as tax incidence theory. John S. Mill’s

comments on direct and indirect taxation in his Principles of Political

*Francis K. Peddle is Vice-President (Academic) and Associate Professor of Philoso-

phy, Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada and President, Robert Schalken-

bach Foundation, New York.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October, 2012).

© 2012 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Economy formed the backbone of judicial decision-making on

taxation well into the twentieth century. This is no oversight for

George (1981: 27) declares early on in The Science of Political

Economy that “the body economic, or “Greater Leviathan,” always

precedes and underlies “the body politic or Leviathan.” Political

economy is concerned with the body economic, not the body politic.

Tax incidence theory and the field of public finance, for instance, sit

atop the economic substructure.

The word “nature” and the phrase “law of nature” occur innumerable

times in George’s treatment of political economy. In the more philo-

sophical and cosmological first chapters of Book I of The Science of

Political Economy, which is concerned with the meaning of the phrase

“political economy,” nature, or the world, is distinguished into three

elements or factors: (i) mind, soul or spirit; (ii) matter; and (iii) motion

or force or energy. It is indisputable to him that priority must be given

to the spiritual. Philosophy, for George (1981: 9), who had no technical

training in the discipline, was simply the search for the nature and

relation of things. Humanity is separated from the rest of nature in that

humans are makers and producers. Humanity grows and advances by

virtue of natural laws and the very constitution of things, not by virtue

of any pact or covenant that may issue out of the body politic (1981: 23).

The Greater Leviathan is thus a natural system and arrangement that

may or may not be advanced by the all-too-human Leviathan. George’s

theory of the body economic is organic, not contractual, teleological,

nor mechanistic. The state is thus an epiphenomenon of civilization. It

is natural law that underlies all civilizations.

The “laws of nature” are dealt with explicitly by George in chapter VII

of Book I of The Science of Political Economy. This section is the most

illustrative in the Georgist corpus of his fundamental philosophical

orientation. At the beginning of the chapter the epistemological divide

between Kant and Hume is not cited directly. Whether knowledge

arises from experience primarily or whether it intrinsically “belongs to

our human nature as its original endowment” George (1981: 44) leaves

alone as an insoluble philosophical problem. Unfortunately he states

that the debate is “merely verbal” and unnecessary to join for purposes

of political economy. This reflects and anticipates obliquely the general

dismissal, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of metaphysi-

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