Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1438

Draft by Heath for a proposed letter to Will Durant, to be sent as if from Heath’s friend, Dr. S.A. Schneidman, Bellaire, Long Island, New York, who was acquainted with Durant.

September 1945

 

 

Dear Will Durant:

 

     You may remember me……… (personal reminder etc.)

    In your capacity as collector, critic and analyzer of philosophic thought in its bearing on social progress, I may be doing you a considerable favor in bringing to your attention the original and somewhat startling ideas that have been set up in MSS. form under the title Citadel, Market & Altar. I have known the author of this for quite a number of years, since his retirement from a successful engineering career to undertake similar re­search in the field of social phenomena. He tells me that the abstract philosophies (so brilliantly reflected in your own notable compendia) were the love of his youth, but now, upon a background of the physical and biological sciences — the sciences that have any success­ful technologies, and boldly applying their basic con­ceptions and mode of energy analysis in the new field — he seems to have come upon the matter from a wholly new and most promising angle of attack.

    Mr. Heath is not a professional writer and has but little, if any, academic or other reputation, outside of the fields of engineering and law, in which latter he holds both the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. He is therefore intellectually, as well as financially free. His present objective is to obtain such auspicious pub­lication of his methods and results as will claim the sober attention of a considerable number of enterprising and outstanding minds. He thinks this is a necessary pre­liminary towards inducing those substantial persons, who in all communities have the major ownership in the sites, resources and improvements, to some conception of the incomes (and hence enormous permanent values) they can create for themselves by combining and organizing, as owners, to give protection (against governmental pressures, primarily) and other public services to the wealth-producing populations using and inhabiting the lands (sites and resources) and other fixed properties of their com­munities.

     Mr. Heath believes that, once the fundamental principle (the performing and exchanging of public services and goods, as well as private, upon the measured basis of free contract and exchange begins to be understood, the owners of communities, and eventually of nations, will, under economic motivation, automatically combine and, by extending their services as owners and receiving vol­untary incomes, they will gradually displace the politi­cal and coercive community administration. He believes that governmental revenues are not related to, measured by, or even dependent on, any services being performed, and that only those who are voluntarily and automatically recompensed for so doing — namely, the owning or proprietary authority in a community — can protect and truly serve its people, thus make and leave them free.

     Your arresting volume, Philosophy and the Social Problem, is often referred to by my friend as showing how the greatest minds have strained without seeing any primary principle of social functioning (such as contrac­tual versus coercive processes) and hence no definite focus. He holds that in the social field, as in the physical, it is only by applications of new knowledge, and not by education in the old, that improvements and advancements can be made.

     The manuscript (original) is now being considered by a University Press — one of the large universities. The Editor-in-Chief is very favorable, even eager, it seems. But, upon a set of ideas so arresting yet so contrary to nearly all the accepted thinking of the past, he hesitates to risk the verdict of the usual specialists in social and economic theory and tradition. It has been suggested, and to some extent verified, that historians might be able to take a wider and less confining view.

     Whatever may be your final reaction, I feel sure that once you recover from the mild shock of the extreme unorthodoxy, you will be well rewarded as you extend your examination.

     Mr. Heath, no less than myself, is a great admirer of your writings and work, especially your analytical skill and literary artistry in the presentation and inter­pretation not only of concrete and complex ideas but also of the simple and solvent, therefore profound. We are both eager to know how these new ideas will impress you, at least in a general way, and will await accordingly.

     I hope your visit to California is for pleasure or business only and not from necessity to recover any health sacrificed to your many — and prodigious — labors.

With all best regards,

Sincerely,