Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3011..

Pencilings in the margin of two copies of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s A Natural Science of Society. The author’s words are in quotes, those of Heath in bold. Not all of Heath’s penciling are reproduced here; for others, see originals envelope which contains photocopies of all of the pages that had pencilings. The original books have been lost.

1961

 

 

FIRST COPY:

Title page/  Social evolution from Iron Rule (“justice”) to Golden Rule. Retaliation — Retribution to rivalry in gift-giving — competition in offering benefits — From mutual injury by force — retaliation to mutual benefit (love) in the equivalence of contract and exchange.

See pp 135-136 and notes. Latest reading Dec. 1961.

General principle of social organization p. 140

23/  “Ultimately, as Whitehead and Heraclitus have it, there are only events ..”

76/  “I am proposing later to consider economic behavior as the conceivable unit behavior of a social science.”

Contract is what makes it social and no longer just familial. … Contractual interfunctioning .  Rational instead of emotional.

77/  [Comparing the people of Tonga and those of Newburyport, MA] The one is familial only. The other familial plus contractual.

80/  Without contract, there is no rationality in “justice.” There are no units in the scales, hence no numbers, hence no ratios.

87/  Human organization takes three types in the order of its persistence — 1. Family.  2. Tribe.  3. Society.  Society is a specific type of organization.  It is of that specific type — contractual — and not of variant types. There are just two types of amenities: familial (animal) on the one hand and familial plus contractual (human) on the other.

89/  “Nevertheless, it is justifiable to study a society synchronically and certainly it is necessary — in order that we may separate out our problems. We say: ‘Let us take a society and consider it as though it were merely persistent, without change.’  If we do that, we cannot arrive at generalizations as to how societies persist. It is logically of the very essence of things that we shall be able to make that discrimination.”

Better, look into how societies (human) grow, not merely “persist.”

93/  Reciprocal relations alone give organic continuity. All this culture is irrelevant, except as by-product.

98/  “A second example are rules of a game, or rules of procedure — rules for chess, or club rules say — characteristic of a certain society.”

Rules for doing business.

106/  “[Durkheim] was misunderstood when he said social usages must be treated as things. People thought he meant real things. When we think of them as events, Durkheim was right; they have a reality which is not simply that of a class.” 

Action

107/  “..if we define a science of society at all, we must that one problem — and only one — of that science is the investigation of the nature of social coaptation.”

Contract

109/  Continuity comes from kinship in small groups, contract in large.

114/  “Are economic relations social relations or not? … If they are, they are part of the science I have outlined. I would say that they are. I would say, for instance, that the relationship between me and the man who picks coffee beans on a Brazilian hillside for the coffee I eventually drink at breakfast is a social relationship.

Eminently

135/ “ If this can be demonstrated by rational analysis and application to empirical data, we shall have started with one single abstract principle, that of simple justice, and have tied up with it law, religion, and economics.”

Principle of balance — equivalence.  Evolution: “Justice” as retribution. Damages as compensation — “law”  Matching gifts — emulation, saving “face.” All leading to the practice of rational (measured) exchange — contract and consent. Social growth out of the iron rule of force into practice of the Golden Rule of mutual service by contract and exchange.

136/  “In our own religion it takes the highly elaborate form of vicarious atonement. All men, being sinners, ought to suffer. As a matter of justice, since we have all sinned, we all deserve to be punished. Expiation is not left to each of us individually, however. God’s son, having become incarnate and having suffered death, thereby expiated all our sins. One gets the sacrifice of the god himself in this and certain other instances — Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus, for instance. ..”

Barbarous!

“.. The particular notion of sin and expiation in a highly complex pattern, however, is especially characteristic of Christian theology.”

Not of Christ!

“We find that in any society goods are circulated always according to the fundamental principle of equivalent and fair exchange. Even in the simpler societies, where there is no buying and selling, one nevertheless finds the custom of gift exchange on the basis of a just equivalent return.”

There is no injury and no expiation here. This rises above mere animal nature.

 

SECOND COPY:

10/  Philosophy is the method common to all of the natural sciences as they develop.

12/  “Certain Aristotelian principles, which have been taken for granted, in philosophy, in theology, in science, I consider too radical, and prefer rather those held by the Ephesian School almost a thousand years earlier. Heraclitus of Ephesus conceived of reality as consisting solely of events and relations between events.”