The impact of Henry George's land value taxation theory was nothing less than global in scope, and his epochal Progress and Poverty – first published in 1879 – gained wider fame than any other political or socio-economic treatise emanating from an American pen. While George's doctrine was essentially a product of of his experience in California during the land-grabbing 60's and 70's, the most pervasive influence of the San Francisco sage was not manifested at home, but in Europe, Australasia and other distant places.

It is with some aspects of this remarkable diffusion of Georgeism during the latter part of the 19th century that this study is concerned. In particular, we would like to examine the circumstances under which this ideological stimulus was transmitted and received in such divergent settings as England, China and Japan. First we will trace the history of the Georgeist influence in each of these countries and then compare their respective patterns of development.

“Unity and variety” in the Islamic cultural tradition has recently been made the centralizing theme of a number of essays by eminent orientalists in a volume edited by Professor von Grunebaum. Another important recent book by Professor W. C. Smith has a similar theme, though it is more concerned with the contemporary adjustment of Islam to new political and social conditions in a number of Muslim countries. Social scientists, however, as opposed to orientalists, have tended to disregard the unifying aspects of classical Islam and have concentrated upon the particular variety of Islam practiced in a particular place or that practiced by a particular group of people. Perhaps the only social area where both “unity” and “variety” are brought close enough for examination by the social scientist is in the study of the organization, the social and political role, and the ideology of the recognized learned man of Islam: the alim, mullah, akhund, or kijaji.

In what follows, I begin by asking a paradigmatic question to clarify some problems of definition (I). Next, Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution is examined as a scientific definition of revolution (II). Its application to the Netherlands revolt concludes the essay (III). Many logical problems are oversimplified and some are ignored altogether. This is done to keep the lid down on several Pandora's boxes, notably those labelled methodology in the social sciences, language philosophy, and historical laws, about which a great deal, some of it relevant here, has been written already. At the same time, I am concerned with the complexity of the problems raised and with suggesting that the ways in which definitions of historical events can be used deserve as much attention as the definitions themselves.

It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself from the use of non-historical categories of explanation in order to consitute itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history.

Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation, most previous historiography has been informed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a specific set of social values and has used historical materials as either a mine of examples for support of the position pre-chosen (like Cicero) or as evidence for the study of phenomena the noumena of which lie just outside the range of history proper (like Marx). The former approach never really arrives at history, the latter passes through it too rapidly to the goal which it believes lies beyond it. In so far as most previous historiography has been governed by these two tendencies, it has always been philosophy of history rather than history proper.

In the last issue Richard A. Easterlin criticized some arguments which I have advanced. Because I think that his main point is at least partially irrelevant, I shall briefly summarize my argument. I suggested that demographic growth in the pre-industrial West was determined primarily by levels of fertility, levels which depended in large part on economic factors, and that mortality has been the major variable in the demographic growth of most less developed countries today mainly because they do not control fertility in the interest of the maintenance of a given standard of living. From this basic difference, I drew a number of consequences. Among them, but by no means the most important, was the one to which Easterlin devoted most attention. It was my statement: “Hence, there is the possibility that improved nutrition and health will increase birth rates fantastically.”1 Easterlin omitted the first six words of the sentence from his quotation.

Historic China and pre-industrial Europe were both once typed as rigid societies with their population more or less frozen into fixed social groupings. Since in both cases the trend of research has altered this view, one cannot help wondering why it ever prevailed. The present revision in Chinese studies is the more dramatic in being a return to the view of Quesnay, namely, that Confucian ideals guaranteed a constant social circulation: men of merit could rise in the world, but their sons, if they were inept, would sink. In medieval and early modern European studies there has been a steady shift away from emphasis on hereditary fixity to recognition that very considerable currents of social mobility may exist within a stable social structure.

In both fields writers had begun by relying on ideals of order, rather incautiously, as a clue to actual custom. Confucian philosophy and ethical doctrine, it is true, gave rise to Quesnay's happy guess, but when this was discarded as doubtful, scholars fell back on legal texts. Here they found ideals of order expressed in an array of distinctions of juridical status. Instead of still postulating that these were mere lines of demarcation between groups, lines that a man could cross, they chose to regard them as effective barriers to mobility.