Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1561

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Floyd A. (“Baldy”) Harper, The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY.

November 14, 1955

Dear Dr. Harper:

     I have just finished reading your Sequoyah. Let me give you my heartiest acclaims, for your having laid down, I firmly believe, a completely valid précis for the development of a sound science of society. You have shown the necessity for a purely quantitative approach by means of units which must be expressed in symbols. And you have drawn upon the authority of such minds as Kelvin’s to confirm you in this.

     In the physical world, we have, fundamentally, a thing called “action” — energy or power extending through a period or periods of time — quantified and expressed in symbols such as gram (or dyne), centimeter and second, and the parts of which, that is, force, motion and time, taken together in their many variant proportions constitute the entire realm of physical events. The basic unit of all this is Planck’s quantum of action, whose symbol is h and which denotes the magnitude (but not the quality or com­position) of the least unitary event that can be objectively and physically experienced.

     The corresponding unit in the human and social field is the average indivisible individual. Taken statistically in large numbers, these units may be treated as uniform and equal in magnitude while possessing the utmost variety of composition and kind. Without this variety, organiza­tion through reciprocal relations could not take place.

     At the human level, the physical and biological energy of men is transformed through the psychological process, the meeting of minds, into social energy. This transformed energy is called value — exchange value. It is quantified in the social psychology of the market and is represented in value units by the dollar sign or whatever symbol or unit may be employed to represent the unit quantities of human “action” which men reciprocally exchange in an interfunctioning and thereby organic (living) human society.

     Your Sequoyah takes advanced ground out on the fron­tier where the new science of society is certain to be developed, and by which science men will come, through rationality, into their full creative and thereby spiri­tual power. Incidental to the exercise of this power, men will find something far beyond the mere maintenance of their animal lives, far beyond resistance to what is inimical, far beyond the kind of pleasure which consists in the negation of pain, into those ecstasies which can be likened only to the divine.

     My hearty congratulations to you again,

Sincerely,

SH/m

I enclose my “Prefatory Note Concerning the Quantum, the Erg-second, the Horse-power-hour and the Life-year.”

S.H.