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8 Cathrein's careless clerical critique - Part II: nineteenth-century British and continental critics
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Nov, 2003 by Robert V. Andelson
Perhaps the most influential Continental European critic of Henry George was Father Victor Cathrein (1845-1931), a Swiss-born Jesuit who wrote extensively on ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy, as well as on purely religious themes. His impact may be gauged by the fact that two of his works, Der Sozialismus and Moral-philosophie, went into twenty or more editions; the great Protestant theologian and social ethicist, Emil Brunner, cites him in The Divine Imperative no less than fourteen times as a definitive representative of Roman Catholic thought.
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Cathrein's attack on George originally appeared in 1887 as a series of articles in the Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, published by the German Fathers of the Society of Jesus. It was preceded in the same journal five years earlier by a series in which Cathrein sought to refute Emile de Laveleye's contention that private ownership of land is a relatively recent and unnatural development. The New York Freeman's Journal issued an English translation of both series, from February 18 to April 28, 1888, and the following year they were updated, enlarged, and brought together in a single volume by President J. U. Heinzle, S. J., of Canisius College in Buffalo. It is to this volume, approved by Cathrein and entitled, The Champions of Agrarian Socialism, that we shall be referring in the ensuing pages.
With the first chapters of the work we need not concern ourselves, for they deal with Laveleye and his historical research. George, it is true, accepted the conclusions of this research, but, as Cathrein concedes, (1) his chief arguments do not rest upon it.
Cathrein opens his critique of George with an attempt to "give the Devil his due," saying that "in unflinching consistency and in powers of agitation" the author of Progress and Poverty "leaves all his predecessors far behind." He credits him with "a clear mind" and "extensive knowledge," with a "luminous" and "eloquent" style, and with having "occupied himself seriously with the study of the questions he proposes." (2) He then attempts to show in the forty-eight remaining pages that George was muddled, inconsistent, and either ignorant of or obvious to obvious economic facts.
Arguments from Political Economy
George's main arguments are based upon considerations of political economy, on the one hand, and of ethics, on the other. The arguments from political economy with which Cathrein takes issue are those that hold that with increasing productive progress an ever-increasing portion of a nation's wealth flows to the proprietors of land, to the prejudice of both labor and capital.
The demonstration for this is treated by Cathrein under the form of two proofs, one of them taken from "Ricardo's Law of Rent," which he recognizes as being accepted as correct by most economists. (3) According to this law, the rent of land is determined by the excess of the produce of a given parcel over that which the least productive land will yield with the same application of productive power. Therefore, reasons George, the return of the poorest land in use represents the highest limit of that portion of the product that generally goes to labor and capital even in the best locations. Everything above the limit goes to the landowner as ground rent. As more and more land is utilized due to the growth of population and the increase in economic activity, less and less desirable land is increasingly brought into use, and wages and interest drop accordingly while rent goes up. (4)
Cathrein begins by attempting to show that this account is factually inaccurate. He produces statistics (derived from the second edition of G. Schoenberg's Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie) to establish that notwithstanding a vast advance in population and total revenue in Great Britain over the preceding four decades, the share of national wealth going to income from landed property had sharply decreased. (What is true of Britain, he says, may also be asserted of Continental Europe, adducing as evidence the complaints of landed proprietors, both great and small, in Germany and France.)
The reliability of these statistics is open to dispute, for one cannot but question whether they reflect the rent of all land or merely land devoted mainly to agricultural production. For example, Cathrein separates the income from "houses" (buildings in general) from the income from land alone, but does not specify under which category he subsumes the income from the land upon which the houses stand. Since all of his examples and remarks pertain to husbandry, (5) and since the discrete valuation of sites and improvements is a practice that did not come into common use until a later date, it is by no means improbable that he (or Schoenberg) made the error of including with income from houses considerable revenue that ought to have been attributed to land.
Cathrein goes on to say that George takes a one-sided view of the case, considering only the causes that raise rent, while almost entirely losing sight of those that make it decline. His discussion here relates exclusively to agricultural lands, and clearly betrays his persistent failure (shared by Father Juan Alcazar Alvarez, another priestly European critic of George dealt with in this volume) to bear in mind that it is not agricultural but rather urban and industrial sites that yield the highest rent. An adequate critique of George on this point would have required that Cathrein demonstrate that rent is subject to forces that cause its diminution in all locations, not just in those where it is normally relatively marginal in any case.
