ABSTRACT
The social credit movement of the 1930s was the product of collaboration between Alfred Richard Orage and Major Clifford Hugh Douglas. In the years immediately following World War I Orage, the guild socialist editor of the New Age, opened the columns of his paper to Douglas, the engineer turned monetary reformer, and forged an economics of guild socialism. Following the end of the collaboration between
Douglas and Orage in 1922, ‘Douglasism’ and the social credit movement came to be identified with monetary reform. The guild socialist origins of social credit were overlooked in the quest for a solution to economic stagnation. This chapter explores the background to the writing of the original Douglas/New Age texts, published between 1918 and 1924. Brief biographies of Douglas and Orage are followed by a review of the contemporary theories of guild socialism and monetary reform.
