About Spencer Heath:

Spencer Heath (1876-1963) pursued many and varied careers in his lifetime, but all held a common challenge. As engineer, inventor, lawyer, manufacturer, horticulturist, lecturer, social theorist, philosopher or poet, he would look at the context, standing back in his  imagination and asking how any given activity functioned relative to every other in the unfolding process of an emergent society. He  was interested in context, process, growth, and evolution—a generalist sin par. He was intrigued by novelty, not for its sake alone but  always to understand its functional relation to what had gone before, was now, and might yet be.

Heath was well known in the early decades of the twentieth century for his pioneering role in the fledgling aviation industry. Following an early and widely varied career in engineering, he studied law. He became a patent attorney with such notable clients as Christopher and Simon Lake, inventors of the even-keel-submerging submarine, and Emile Berliner, inventor of the telephone receiver and the flat-disk phonograph record that replaced the wax cylinder. Berliner commissioned him in 1907 to design and build a set of rotary  blades to test for the first time the helicopter principle—that such an arrangement of blades could lift the weight of an engine into he  air. The test was successful, and the aerodynamics so intrigued Heath that he continued designing and making propellers. The king of Siam, deeply interested in Western technology and especially heavier-than-air flight, was a prime customer in those earliest years. By 1912 propellers had become such a successful sideline that Heath gave up his law practice and moved from Washington to Baltimore to form the American Propeller & amp; Manufacturing Company and, later, Paragon Engineers.

In Baltimore, simply for the enjoyment of designing and building machinery and not because any demand yet warranted it, he developed the first machine mass-production of airplane propellers, replacing the man who stood at a bench and carved them out by hand. When World War I broke out, he supplied most of the propellers used by the Allied governments in that conflict. After the war, his “Paragon” propellers drove the Navy N-C planes on the first trans-Atlantic flight. And in 1922, he demonstrated at Bolling Field the first successful engine-powered and -controlled, variable and reversible pitch propeller, which did for airplanes what gearing does for the automobile—a technology required for commercial aviation. He predicted commercial aviation that year, and it made news. ¹

Late in the summer of 1929, Heath, then 53 years old, sold all his patents and facilities to Bendix Aviation, including his services for two years as a research engineer. After that, he retired to Roadsend Gardens, his country place in Elkridge, Maryland, outside of Baltimore, to devote himself to experimental horticulture and his long-time interest, the philosophy of science.

This began an intensely creative period. Heath set out to discover what the successful sciences, meaning those which have given rise to dependable technologies, have in common that could help develop an authentic natural science of society. He outlined such a science in his “Energy Concept of Population” ²  and called it socionomy, reviving a little-used term defined in Webster’s New  International Dictionary as the “theory or formulation of the organic laws exemplified in the organization and development of society.”

In 1932 he helped found the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City and for several years lectured there, having been attracted to the Henry George movement since the 1890s for its championing of free trade. However, he was always uncomfortable with George’s exclusion of land from free trade. This exception to George’s free-trade stance brought Heath attention to private  property in land, which he then commenced examining from a descriptive and functional rather than a normative standpoint. He  concluded that, far from a pathology, private property in land was a fundamental social institution that, as it further evolved and  matured, would make Henry George’s “Philosophy of Freedom” self-consistent and its application self-enacting. This enabled Heath to forecast, as once he had foretold commercial aviation, the emergence of a general public-services industry producing and  administering public community services of all kinds voluntarily and contractually, for-profit, without recourse to taxation.

In these same years, finally, he perfected his unique view of the historical Jesus as an intuitive poet who anticipated in his positive formulation of the golden rule the coming of what he poetically called the kingdom of heaven on the earth.

These investigations preceding World War II formed three legs of a philosophy of creative capitalism set out in what Heath called his research “engineer’s report,” Citadel, Market and Altar, privately published in 1957. As the mid-twentieth century was a time of ascendant statism, and Heath was not affiliated with any faculty, the book had limited circulation, mainly as private gifts. But it nonetheless evoked some significant responses. ³

Although Spencer Heath is not well-known to the general public today, he influenced a number of thinkers who followed him in promoting voluntary forms of governance. Citadel, Market and Altar was the first book to lay out the ideal of an alternative form of governance based on private property in land and explained as a logical science of society. His grandson, social anthropologist  Spencer Heath MacCallum, expanded on that vision with his own work, The Art of Community. Those two books are foundational in the current movement for free cities--communities that are voluntary, contractual, and for-profit.

Neither Heath nor MacCallum believed in a fantasy that required force from a central authority to fundamentally change human nature. Based on his observations of our incomplete yet rapidly evolving society, Heath predicted that we would outgrow government as we know it in favor of the voluntary, contractual provision of all public services in the foreseeable future.

 

1 Baltimore Sun, August 12, 1922, under the headline, “SAYS PLANES WILL HAVE GENERAL USE: Spencer Heath Predicts Big Demand for Flying Craft:”

2 Citadel, Market and Altar, pp. 3-43. Baltimore: Science of Society Foundation, 1957.

3 The foregoing biographical sketch is an excerpt from “Editor’s Remarks” by Spencer Heath MacCallum in Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men, American Institute for Economic Research, 2022