Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2047

Review of Citadel, Market & Altar by Don Erik Franzen, in Reason Magazine

1974

 

Citadel, Market and Altar, by Spencer Heath. Heather

Foun­dation, 1957, 284 pp., $6.00. Reviewed by Don Erik Franzen.

Spencer Heath was as unique and versatile in the ideas he entertained as in the life he led. Engineer, lawyer, businessman, horticulturist, philosopher and poet, he enjoyed less acclaim during his lifetime for his discoveries in the realm of ideas than for his accomplishments in the development of the early aviation industry. Like many original thinkers, Heath has had to defer to the judgment of time and await a posthumous vindication. Now, a decade after his death, his writing speaks to us with special relevance in its unparalleled effort to surmount the cul de sacs of contemporary social thinking and point the way to a free and solvent community life.

 

First published in 1957, Citadel, Market and Altar is the summit of Heath’s work and the culmination of his twenty-five years of independent research in the realm of social phenomena.

 

The title symbolizes three major functions which must be accommodated by the institutional arrangement of any viable society. The Citadel represents protection — physical safety from violence — which being provided for permits men to secure their material well-being through reciprocal engagements in the Market, which in turn being provided for liberates men’s energies to the spiritual pursuits of the Altar — art, religion or any activity pursued solely for its own sake. The Market maintains men’s lives while the Altar, the province of discovery, advances the quality of their lives not only directly but indirectly as the flowers of the Altar in turn enrich the Market. How best to ensure protection and facilitate exchange in order to achieve the greatest possible release of human energy to creative artistry was the overriding question in Heath’s work.

 

Citadel, Market and Altar addresses itself to the paramount problem of understanding the rationale of social processes and integrating that knowledge with the theoretical frameworks of other natural sciences. Heath’s analysis of the market system, founded on analogies with the concepts of biology and physics, is among the most original I have encountered. High among his accomplishments is the redemption of a word long lost to the opponents of freedom: social processes are classified as relationships of reciprocal exchange, perfectly consonant with the operations of all spontaneous organizations, through which the human life-form is carried upward to qualitatively higher energy levels. Of particular importance is Heath’s determination to move beyond a merely static conception of society. It was Heath’s aim in Citadel, Market and Altar to predict the direction in which the opera­tions of society must evolve if the parts of the “societal life form” are to function in complete harmony. “The Mecca of the economist is Economic Biology,” said Alfred Marshall, and it was Heath’s Mecca as well.

 

Set within the context of Heath’s synoptic view of market operations, his explication of the social function of property in land takes on a breadth of meaning seldom encountered in a subject as old as Adam Smith. Reversing the orientation of classical economics, Heath demonstrates that property in land, far from being the Achilles’ heel, is in fact the foundation of society’s successful operation. In answer to the classical critics of landownership, Heath provides a noteworthy analysis of the social service rendered by landowners in their capacity as distributors of /titles to/ the com­munity’s sites and resources. To quote Murray Rothbard: “I do not know anyone who has brought out the productivity of land owners as clearly as Mr. Spencer Heath.” [Man, Economy and State, page 929]

 

Having vindicated the landlord’s role in society, Heath proceeds to his forecast of the trend of social evolu­tion. A historical and functional analysis of community organization leads to the discovery that the social role for which the landowner is ultimately and uniquely suited is that of community administration. Land values are shown to be dependent on the quantity and quality of “public goods and services” — such as roads, utilities, fire and police protection — conferred on land sites. The value of such services, net of any disservices coincidentally supplied by the politi­cal authority, is reflected in competitively determined ground rents. The landowner, therefore, is in a unique position to monitor the social value of public services as revealed in ground rents just as the entrepreneur monitors the relative values of other goods by watching their prices. Moreover, it is in his interest to ensure that such services are supplied; the penalty for dereliction in this responsibility is declining rents.

 

As landowners gradually become aware of their inherent interest in the provision of public services, Heath foresaw the emergence of corporate enterprises that would undertake the task of supplying such services in exchange for competitively fixed compensations by leaseholders. Among the services such organizations would be in a position to provide are fire protection and security systems, maintenance of public highways and utilities, and, most importantly, the crucial service of fostering the most productive uses of sites and resources, a needed service that municipalities have attempted to provide, with uneven results, through political devices such as zoning.

 

These proprietary communities are for Heath the sole viable alternative to the waste and abuses of political systems, and represent the culmination of man’s advance from a society of status to one of contract. Whether Heath’s prediction that the emergence of the proprietary community portends the eventual absorption of the Citadel into the Market proves to be true or not, it is sufficient justification of his work that he has directed our attention to an unexplored approach that offers some hope of remedy for the acknowledged failures of political govern­ment.

 

Citadel, Market and Altar’s trilogistic development of the proprietary community theme from the standpoints of science, practical technology and philosophy, permit the book to be approached as a collection of essays or as a comprehensive treatise, as the reader wishes. However approached, the book will generously reward the reader with novel insights into the operations and potentialities of the market economy. But above all, Citadel Market and Altar treats us to the expansive vision of a man who consciously strove to unify the falsely dichotomized worlds of esthetics and science in his effort to delineate the direction of mankind’s move­ment toward a world in which the creative promise of the human spirit may be fully realized.

 

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/The following paragraph was the second in this review but has been replaced by that now appearing above, which may have been an amendment by Heath./

 

The title distills Heath’s view of the ideal divi­sion of functions among the departments of society: the Citadel offers protection from violence and theft, permitting mankind to advance their material well-being through the opera­tions of the Market to such point as they are able to devote their energies to the spiritual pursuits of the Altar — art and religion. To determine how these mechanisms of protection and exchange might be more efficiently operated to allow a further release of mankind’s energies for the higher end of intellectual and artistic creativity was among the chief goals of Heath’s work.