Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1687

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Felix Morley, Gibson Island, Maryland

1959

Dear Dr. Morley:

     I have just finished reading your article on “Individuality and the General Will” and want to tell you how much I admire its clear discrimination. It throws much light on the sources of our current academic confusions. I like your substantial identification of social contract with the common law, as understood by Dr. Pound, and as the counterpart of natural law in the scientific sense. Also your attribution of authoritarian tyranny to every kind of attempt to enforce some hypothetical general will. And your paper so well illuminates the middle ground, sought by the American Founders, between its coercive enforcement by a central authority or by an equally coercive authority democratically diffused.

     Experience does not show that this middle ground can be maintained. Dr. Judith N. Shklar’s scholarly critique of all political thinking (After Utopia; The Decline of Political Faith, Princeton, 1958) concludes on a note of despair and calls for a new and “genuinely radical political philosophy.” If you have not done so, I am sure you will enjoy reading it.

     I hope the world-political situation has not been discouraging to you, in view of the long-term movements in history which constitute the general trend.

     Wishing you many happy new years,

                        Sincerely,