ABSTRACT
The writings of Major C.H. Douglas gave rise to the social credit movement, popular
throughout the inter-war years. Douglas’s earliest books, Economic Democracy and
Credit-Power and Democracy, first appeared in serial form in the socialist journal the
New Age in the period immediately following World War I. Close examination of the
early ‘Douglas/New Age’ texts alongside the literature of guild socialism reveals that
the editor of the New Age, A.R. Orage, provided Douglas with a great deal more than
editorial support in the formulation of the original texts. Without Orage’s guild
socialist contribution Douglas’s technical observation of the accounting mechanisms
which underlie the role of finance in the formulation of policy on production and
distribution would have provided unpromising material for a popular debate which
was to be sustained over two decades throughout the English-speaking world. Orage’s
synthesis of contemporary heterodox economic thought contributed the vital
prerequisites for a revolutionary analysis of capitalist economic orthodoxy based
upon the centrality of time and finance. The resultant Douglas/New Age texts form
the basis of an economics of socialism in line with Smith’s (1962) definition as an
absence of economic conflict.
