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An Anthology of Henry George's Thought . Volume 1 of the Henry George Centennial Trilogy. Edited by Kenneth C. Wenzer. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 253. $59.95.

The centenary of Henry George's death has occasioned at least five edited works, underscoring the perennial fascination exerted by this seminal American political economist and social philosopher: Land Use and Taxation: Applying the Insights of Henry George, edited by H. James Brown (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1997); the second (and completely new) edition of Land-Value Taxation Around the World, edited by this reviewer (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1997); and the Henry George Trilogy, edited by Dr. Wenzer, of which the book under consideration is Volume 1. (Volume 2, An Anthology of Tolstoy's Spiritual Economics, reflects George's profound influence upon the Russian author. Volume 3, An Anthology of Single Tax Thought, consists of essays by contemporary Georgist scholars.) Wenzer has rendered an important service by bringing together this annotated compilation of George's periodical and epistolary writings, most of which were not hitherto available except in archives. A number of them are actually speeches, but in some instances one looks in vain for information as to where and when they were delivered. A far more limited collection appeared in Volume 8 of The Complete Works of Henry George, published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1904, and now long out of print. It contains only a few items, most notably "The Study of Political Economy" and "Land and Taxation: A Conversation Between David Dudley Field and Henry George," that might profitably have been included in the present work. The selections are well chosen. Some exhibit George's powerful persuasive rhetoric, some present succinct expositions of his distinctive policy prescription, some throw light on where he stood relative to various differences of opinion among his followers, some give his analysis of public issues not generally associated with his name, and others reveal his personal views on diverse topics from female suffrage to the life beyond. The anthology is divided into seven chapters: an Introductory Essay by the editor; Exhortative Works; A Clarification of the Single Tax and Property; On Government, Politics, and the World; Georgism Versus Socialism; On Sundry Important Matters; and Views on Religion and Personal Correspondence. Each chapter other than the first is preceded by a short introduction. In addition, there is a Preface by the editor, and an extensive although not exhaustive bibliography of sources in English, together with two in Russian. (Wenzer, a historian, is equally at home in the literature of nineteenth-century America and Russia.) The lack of an index is a serious inconvenience to the reader. Although George was invariably patient and friendly toward people of humble station, and his temperament was normally more irenic than pugnacious, he could be deliciously caustic when addressing the pretensions of the high and mighty, as witnessed by this observation on Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee: It is a doleful commentary upon the advance of civilization and the diffusion of education that in almost the last decade of the nineteenth century the great body of the English people . . . should go into a spasm of adulation over a woman of whom the very best that can truthfully be said is that she has never flagrantly outraged any of the obvious proprieties of life.