Spencer Heath Archive

Item 166

Pencil by Heath on 3-ring binder sheets.

July 29, 1952

     From remotest times every known portion of the earth, as soon as discovered or explored, comes under the jurisdiction of a public authority.

    

     If this authority is political and maintained by force, by the power and force of war (and of its concomitant tribute or taxation),

 

     This authority is either political or proprietary.

 

     From remotest times every known portion of the earth, occupied by established communities or unoccupied (unless by wandering and scattered tribes) but discovered or explored is found to be under the jurisdiction of two contrasting types of public authority. The one, depending on and maintained by force and war, with its concomitant tribute and taxation, is political. The other, depending on and maintained by the peaceable and customary acceptance and voluntary support of ownership and title, is social.

     The political jurisdiction, the jurisdiction by war and taxation, is called in law the imperium. The social jurisdiction, by ownership and title, is called the proprium. In Roman history and law this distinction is clear.

     Political jurisdiction is aboriginal, that of a powerful tribe or a confederacy over a weaker, that of Cain over Abel.

     Social jurisdiction, administration without force, under the growth of a social mores of ownership and property, and by contract and consent, is evolutional.

     In all nations and times these two jurisdictions are mixed. Society is the evolution of the one out of the other.

     Nomads have no permanent politics because they rule over no permanent communities. Their political power remains scattered and transitory until society in some degree has evolved. Not until then can there be any revenue from war, any system of taxation imposed. Only thereafter can any political power expand, and then only while the productivity of the social process is maintained. After which it must decline with its host and perish back into the transitory force of tribalism whence it sprang, while the social evolution begins anew. Thus for all state and sovereign powers “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

     Sovereignty, the imperium, has no power, no property of its own. It is based on force, expanded by conquests (or alliances) in war and maintained in peace against other and outwardly aggressive sovereignties only by its might of arms, actual or supposed.

     The imperium has no power but to destroy, but the proprium has no need of the imperium; for it has the power of growth, a power all its own.

     Sovereignty is the opposite, the death, of proprietorship, as death is the opposite of life.

     Government depends on society as death depends upon life, for not life itself but only the living, the evolving, can die.

     As sovereignty is the blight so is society the green blade of mankind. It springs up as order and growth out of relative chaos. It germinates unseen when pirates find it more profitable to trade, whenever men find increase and profit even though they seek only to lessen or destroy.¹⁶⁶