Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George

Summary

This essay — the centerpiece of The Corruption of Economics (1994), co-authored with Fred Harrison — is Mason Gaffney's most provocative work. It argues that the rise of neoclassical economics around 1900 was, in part, a deliberate intellectual response to the political threat posed by Henry George's single tax movement.

The Argument

Gaffney marshals archival evidence that early American economics departments were funded by landed and corporate interests, and that influential economists (notably John Bates Clark) reframed economic theory to merge land into capital — erasing the classical distinction between earned income (from labour and capital) and unearned income (from land rent). Once land was no longer a separate category, the moral and economic case for taxing its rent lost its analytical foundation.

Reception

The thesis is controversial and contested by historians of economic thought, but the underlying archival record on the funding of early economics, and the disappearance of land from the standard factors of production, is well documented and widely acknowledged even by critics. The wiki's principal counter-source is Blaug (2000), which carries the mainstream analytic-grounds historiography and the skeptical peer-review reception (Milgate, JEL 1996).

Bears On

• Missemer & Pottier (2025) — the historiographical counter-assessment
• Richard T. Ely
• People: Mason Gaffney · Henry George · John Bates Clark
• Concept: Land Monopoly
• Narrative: The Corruption of Economics — the persuasive deployment, with both historiographies mapped
• Counter-source: Blaug, "Henry George: Rebel with a Cause"

See Also

• Gaffney: Two Centuries of Economic Thought on Taxation of Land Rents — Gaffney's broader, sixty-name, less accusatory 1982 companion covering overlapping ground on J. B. Clark's "blocked mental pathway"
• Gaffney (1994): Land as a Distinctive Factor of Production — Gaffney's companion argument on the land/capital distinctions this stratagem thesis claims neoclassical theory erased
• Mason Gaffney — the author
• Henry George · John Bates Clark

Sources

1. Mason Gaffney (1994), "Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George" — used for Gaffney's thesis (an attributed, contested interpretation) that early neoclassical economics was shaped in part to obscure the land question and blunt the single-tax movement. PDF · archived · 📄 Local copy
2. Mason Gaffney & Fred Harrison (1994), The Corruption of Economics (book).