Spencer Heath Archive

Item 910

Pencil notes in a notebook

Spring 1956?

Original is in item 908.

The present author has admired for many years the excellent and most illuminating writings of Fustel de Coulanges, particularly the Origin of Property in Land, London 1891. On the question whether or not the village community as commonly described

This chapter, as first written contained no reference to the Village Community as a phase of evolution towards the non-political Proprietary Society. It is now included as an extremely probable mode of association, chiefly patriarchal, between pure nomadism and either proprietary (by custom and contract) or political (by conquest and coercion) administration or as the form of association to which a population reverts when both proprietary and political administration have broken down — the former under impact of the latter.

Mr. Fustel de Coulanges’ researches point to the existence of either the proprietary or the political mode of administration arising after the Village Community possibly had either evolved into the one or had been perverted into the other of those two forms. The Village kinship community as a stage of organization anterior to either the proprietary or the political is here introduced in the main because of its high logical probability, its numerous modern survivals as well as out of deference to the scholarship that M. Fustel de Coulanges so pointedly calls in question. It is to be noted that the only essential question between M. Fustel de Coulanges and those whom he criticizes is whether or not there was a non-political kinship mode of organization anterior to either the proprietary or the political.