America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume II of this series presents the unabridged text of Progress and Poverty, arguably the most influential work of Henry George. The original text is supplemented by notes which explain the changes George made during his lifetime and the many references he made to history, literature, economics, and public policy. A new index augments accessibility to the text and key terms. The introductory essay, “The Rhetoric and the Remedy,” by series co-editor William S. Peirce, provides an overview of the historical context for George’s philosophy of economics and summarizes the argument of Progress and Poverty within the framework of the economic theories of his day. It then looks at some of the early reactions by leading economists and opinion makers to George’s fervent and eloquent call for economic justice. Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty in order to identify and resolve the great paradox of modern industrial life. How was it possible for abject poverty, financial instability, and extreme economic inequality to co-exist with rising productivity and technological progress? He analyzed and rejected the widely held beliefs that poverty inevitably followed from the laws of economics or from a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. George concluded that at the heart of this dilemma was how society treated natural resources, especially urban land. He did not succumb to the panacea of arbitrarily confiscating property or taking from the rich to give to the poor. George argued that taxes on productive labor and capital should be drastically reduced. His “sovereign remedy” declared that public goods could be adequately funded from the returns to land and other natural resources. The activities of society as a whole give land its value. It is therefore both equitable and efficient for the community to tax or recapture land values to support the activities of government.

In this concise text, the distinguished American philosopher John Dewey compiled excerpts from the massive Progress and Poverty to provide those unfamiliar with Henry George's work with the essence of the author's thinking on economics. In his Foreword, Dewey noted, "It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato down rank with [George]. No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker." Fifteen brief chapters feature passages from George's highly influential book and examine why poverty persists throughout periods of economic and technological progress as well as the basis for economic cycles of boom and bust.

This is the book that made its author Henry George suddenly famous. From the year 1879 to the present the doctrines of 'Progress and Poverty' have been familiar to all who are interested in social problems. The book has been read by many to whom Political Economy is still 'the dismal science', and it has been circulated in cheap editions by the thousand among the classes to which it holds out such an alluring prospect. 'Progress and Poverty' has become a classic in labor literature. Its doctrines have been accepted not only by many who see in them a means of personal rescue from distress and want, but by many others who are convinced by the reasoning of the author. Clergymen , in the Catholic as well as in the Protestant church, have become Mr. George's disciples, and business and professional men have gladly sat at his feet.

Henry George the greatest, most famous and most rejected of early American economists who trained himself in classical economics and developed a theory of a 'single tax'. There is much literature on many specific facets and aspects of George's work, but we lack a book which provides an overview of George's economics... until now!