Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1435

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Eugene Davidson, Yale University Press, New Haven 7, Connecticut

September 25, 1945

Dear Mr. Davidson:

Thanks for your prompt acknowledgement. I mailed the missing Geoffrey Brunn letters only about an hour later. I hope they arrived with the next mail.

I am wondering how your anthropologist will react to an examination of mankind based on the spontaneously collective man — the autonomous interfunctioning of men in which they constitute the social organization. I hope not as do the dogmatic moralists who seem bent on shift­ing the ancient curse from the individual to the collec­tive man and who write conspicuously under such titles as Moral Man and Immoral Society. /Reinhold Niebuhr 1932/

Thinking of Professor Crane Brinton who used to be in the Department of History at Harvard, I have written him today as per the carbon I enclose, hoping he is still there. I am confident my review of Henry George’s Pro­gress and Poverty will interest him. By the time he has examined this I hope to have a copy of my completed manuscript based on the Energy Concept available for him.

Perhaps the historians, not the mere chroniclers and verifiers of minutiae but those of such intellectual tradition as Buckle and Guizot — having the most general views and being least narrowly specialized — are best qualified to evaluate an attempted comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of society.

Sincerely yours,