Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2755

Typed page promoting Citadel, Market and Altar

No date

SUMMARY

CITADEL, MARKET and ALTAR, by Spencer Heath, is a benignly revolutionary book — a vital and a wholly new departure in social thinking. For, following the method common to the natural sciences, this author abandons every reliance on the enactments of political authorities and gives attention instead to the natural laws that govern the interfunctioning of socially integrated men whereby actual and exchangeable values are created and the social organiza­tion is maintained.

 His examination of much neglected data on social origins and early community organization brings newly to light a proprietary public authority, now almost dormant in our midst, having a non­coercive, value-creating and wholly self supporting mode of pub­lic administration that embodies the free-enterprise principle and is capable of vast extension into the whole public domain. He thus makes appraisement of the positive social resources and looks to the wholesome ambition of far-visioned men to extend the produc­tive free-enterprise technology into the broad field of common and public services and thereby create vast new incomes and values for themselves, and ultimately for all.

 This awaiting proprietary authority, this free-enterprise alternative to political administration, calls for the free organization — and the public-serving for profit — of unified community-wide properties by practical and profit-motivated men: yet the author holds it is none the less vital to those who cherish individual freedom and, as for artists and idealists, it is the necessary condition for any high realization of their dreams.

 Positive antidote to all communism, whether disguised in benevolent sugar-coating or in the vulgar raw, this book brings fully into view the nature and the heretofore unimagined potential­ities of our only lately evolved and evolving creative capitalism. Far from urging any ersatz Utopia, the soundness and the very great importance of this book is vouched by scholars, jurists, outstanding economists, prominent churchmen and leaders in many lines.

 Like important discoveries in other fields, this re-discovery of the proprietary principle as being proper to the public field, as it is in all private administration, must come under intelligent public discussion sufficient to induce the united ownership and public-servicing of sites and lands on a community-wide basis and upwards, and thus reverse into solvency and enormous profit the present inefficient and even perilous conduct of public affairs.

THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY FOUNDATION, Inc.

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