Cord, Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? (1965)

Overview

Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? is a scholarly study by economist Steven B. Cord, published in 1965 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, that reviews how American economists and historians treated Henry George and his single-tax proposal from the 1879 publication of Progress and Poverty onward.[1] Cord's central finding is that despite George's enormous public influence and his recognized importance as a seminal figure in both economics and social history, many professional economists and historians did not engage seriously with his ideas — some dismissing his "plebeian" appeal to the "common man" even as the reading public, and many popular authors and periodical editors, were moved by his diagnosis of the 1870s depression and his proposed remedy.[2] A contemporary review of the book's 1984 republication captures the same thesis, describing it as "a work which dealt with insight and depth of analysis with the misconceptions, factual inaccuracies and offhand dismissals of the American economist and social philosopher's theories," and noting that although George "alienated many in the academic community," he nonetheless "attracted many leading scholars in it to significant research."[4] Cord is cited as a standard reference on George's academic reception in Mark Blaug's history-of-economic-thought text Economic Theory in Retrospect, which lists the book among the essential further reading on George's place in the discipline.[3]

The book remains one of the earliest systematic attempts to separate George's substantive economic arguments from the popular and political reception of his single-tax movement, a distinction later scholarship on Georgism's historiography — including Robert Andelson's edited reference volumes and Mark Blaug's essay Henry George: Rebel with a Cause — continued to explore.[3]

See Also

• Henry George — the subject of the study
• Progress and Poverty — the 1879 book whose reception Cord traces
• Economic Theory in Retrospect — the source that cites Cord as standard further reading on George's reception
• Blaug, Henry George: Rebel with a Cause — a related later scholarly assessment of George's place in economic thought

Sources

1. Steven B. Cord, Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965). JSTOR record — used for publication details (A-claim).
2. Thomas R. Winpenny (Elizabethtown College), "Book Reviews: Henry George: Dreamer or Realist?, by Steven B. Cord," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 52(3) (July 1985) — journals.psu.edu/phj/article/view/24530 — used for the review's summary of the book's thesis on economists' and historians' mixed reception of George. The review's full text was not fetched this session; the thesis it attests is independently corroborated by source 4 below.
3. Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, 5th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Ch. 3, notes on further reading — discovery source; lists Cord (1965) as directly assessing George's proposals.
4. Robert J. Rafalko, "Was George a Dreamer or a Realist?" (review of Cord's Henry George: Dreamer or Realist?, 2nd ed., Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1984), American Journal of Economics and Sociology 44(4) (1985) — DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.1985.tb02383.x — used for the verbatim characterization of the book's thesis (the abstract, from which the quoted phrases are taken, is openly accessible).