Saving Communities
Bringing prosperity through freedom, equality, local autonomy and respect for the commons.

Henry George
The Science of Political Economy
Book II, The Nature of Wealth

Introduction

01

Since political economy is the science which treats of the nature of wealth and the laws of its production and distribution, our first step is to fix the meaning that in this science properly attaches to its primary term.

02

I shall in the first place show the need for an exhaustive inquiry, by showing the confusion that from the time of Adam Smith has attached to this term, and the utter incoherency with regard to it into which the scholastic economy has now fallen.

03

I shall next try to ascertain the causes of this confusion. This will lead to a consideration of economic development, and in the absence in our literature of any intelligent history of political economy, I shall attempt briefly to trace its course, from the time of Adam Smith and his predecessors, the French economists called Physiocrats, to its virtual abandonment in the teachings of the English and American colleges and universities at the present time.

04

Having seen that the only point as to wealth on which the scholastic economists now agree is that it has value, and that their confusions as to wealth proceed largely from confusions as to value, I shall then try to determine the proper meaning of the term value. That fixed, we shall be in a position to fix the real meaning and relations of the term wealth, and shall proceed to do so.

05

Although in this book it will be seen that I am giving many chapters to a subject which preceding systematic writers have passed over in a few lines, even where, as is the case with many of them, they have not utterly ignored it, I am sure that the reader will ultimately find in the ease and certainty with which subsequent inquiries may be conducted an ample reward for the care thus taken in the beginning.