Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1693

Carbon of a letter from Heath, 312 Halesworth Street, Santa Ana CA, to Leonard E. Read

August 24, 1961

 

 

Dear Leonard Read:

     Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I could hardly escape being frequently impressed with your varied and continuing expositions of the libertarian (or should I say neo-conservative) point of view concerning public affairs.

As you know, I sympathize and in my own small way participate in the at-long-last rising resistance to the bureaucratic tide, but am not fully satisfied with this. I want our conservativism to have its own speci­fic dynamic and aim. If we are going onward and upward, we have got to have some real gas in our tank, and not depend upon the brakes alone merely to retard the popular drift down into the totalitarian Avernus.

In the present rising phenomenon of thousands of self-sustaining communities of many kinds (without benefit of any politics or taxation at all) we can see the new dynamic going forward faster than our apprecia­tion or understanding of it. This, of course, is the basic theme of my own Citadel, Market and Altar (to which you have been kind enough to give some attention). It is even more graphically depicted in a thesis for which my grandson, Spencer MacCallum, has recently received his Master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Washington. In this, he sets out the development of proprietary communities in past, present and future perspective. There may be considerable delay before it is published.  You could get it from the Uni­versity of Washington through your local library via Interlibrary Loan Service.

I am making interesting contacts out here, having recently completed an academic year among the colleges at Claremont as a special guest of the Harvey Mudd College of Science and Engineering, and am now in a fair way of getting this progressive point of view established with the head people of Pepperdine College, in Los Angeles, who are projecting extension courses in real estate administration to include elaboration of the proprietary principle in the large real estate complexes that are arising largely in California and elsewhere.

Next time you come out this way, I would like to have you get in touch with me. There may be interesting things to talk about.        

 

                           Cordially,