Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1237

Exchange between Albert Jay Nock, Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park, New York, and Heath, beginning with penned letter by Nock, followed by Heath.

1939

 

 

 

My dear Mr. Heath:                         7 July 1939

 

I am very much obliged to you for the copy of your writings which you sent me on 29 June. I had already seen your monograph on private property in land, some time ago. I gave your observations on the Energy Concept the closest attention I could put on it, but I do not think I am entitled to an opinion of it, by reason of incompetence. My education and training have been purely literary, and therefore there is a great deal in what you say which I was not able to understand; and even if this were not so my estimate of its material would be of no value. I do not know Mr. Brinton, but I do know Mr. Pearl very well, and have a high regard for him. So think I would defer to his judgment in matters of this kind, without question.

 

     Please accept my best wishes, and believe me very truly yours,

                           

                        /s/ Albert Jay Nock

 

Spencer Heath, Esq.

 

_______________________________

 

Dear Doctor Nock:                         June 29, 1939

I am glad to know that you have been back with us in this country for some time, and hope I may sometime have the pleasure of further visits and conversation with you.

I have just returned from New York, and I regret that I had to do so without any opportunity of seeing you while there. I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Graduating Ceremonies of the Long Island Henry George School on the 23rd. This school seems to be under especially alert and broad minded manage­ment, and I shall probably have further contact with it in my succeeding visits to New York.

Since my last communications with you, I have con­tinued my serious amateur interest (in the best and proper sense of that word) in the social organization itself as a special form of life. I have tried to approach it objectively as a natural phenomenon and from the stand­point of the beauty that is to be found wherever there is a nice adaptation of parts functioning together. /Reminiscent of Heath’s interest in designing machinery. -Ed./

     Some of my observations have led to what appeared to me as interesting and probably useful discoveries. A few of these I have put in written or printed form for convenient communication to friends and critics. I think that my little monograph on private property in land should be of special interest to you. It approaches the subject from a new point of view which I believe is much more fruitful than any taken heretofore. You will note that it is concise and closely reasoned, and I hope you will find it as accurately reasoned as I have intended it to be.

While this explanation of land ownership is treated by me as fundamental to the organization of society, it is, of course, not so fundamental as the material out of which society is organized, namely, population.  I think it is fair to say that population is the basic material which when brought into organic relationships, constitutes a society. In giving consideration to this material, I have developed what I call “The Energy Con­cept of Population”, a brief outline of which I am en­closing in mimeographed form. Probably you will note the parallelism between it and my explanation of private property in land – that it is a more highly generalized view of the same relationships. I would like very much to have your intellectual reaction to this.

Young Professor Brinton, of the History Department, Harvard University, whom you may know as something of a sociological iconoclast, has sent me a letter recently containing the following paragraph:

“The paper on the ‘Energy Concept of Population¹ seems to me one of the most promising bits of social analysis I have seen recently, and I hope very much you will have it printed in one of the learned journals where it will be of readier access. I thoroughly appreciated your crack at Spencer on page 19 of your land pamphlet.”

Editor Moses J. Aronson, of the Journal of Social Philosophy, shows considerable interest in this Energy Concept but, strangely enough, says that it is entirely too specialized for the purposes of his Journal, which, by the way, carries as its superscription “a quarterly devoted to a philosophic synthesis of the social sciences.”

Dr. Raymond Pearl has given the Energy Concept some attention and professes a good deal of interest in it. He also states that the idea of a coefficient of social efficiency is a suggestive one.

There are many more things I would like to write or talk with you about, but this letter is already too long for anything more than my assurance of very high intellec­tual and personal regards.

                           

                            Sincerely,

 

 

Enc.