Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2295

Bruun Correspondence  – from Geoffrey Bruun, 1618 Beverly Road, Brooklyn, New York, commenting on Citadel, Market and Altar (Bruun was history professor at New York University 1927-1941 and book reviewer, Saturday Review of Literature)

1945

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Letter to Heath from Geoffrey Bruun, 1618 Beverly Road, Brooklyn, New York (formerly history professor, New York University, 1927-1941 and book reviewer, Saturday Review of Literature)

September 7, 1945

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

It was very pleasant to meet you last week and to hear your analysis of the problems and proposals embodied in your study CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. I have read through this most unusual and evocative critique and I must repeat what I told you at our interview: that I am not competent to judge the degree of validity or of originality which distinguishes your thought. In sending you, therefore, a digest of the comments and notes I jotted down while reading it, I am doing no more than I offered to do — to give you the sample reaction of one member of that not very extensive circle of the reading public which might be expected to possess the intellectual training and percipience to appreciate so many deeply pondered lines of thought.

 On a separate sheet I have noted the few, remarkably few, typing slips I found, and have questioned two or three points of historical interpretation, history being my field. I must add, for what my opinion may be worth as a writer, that your prose seems to me exceptionally well sustained, unfaltering, strong, pliant, with no unworthy passages and many that rise to nobility and beauty. This sounds stilted, but I am not trying to pay compliments, which is easy, but to express a careful judgment.

 Your reasoning on economic problems I do not always follow and cannot estimate. The emphasis on land and land values seemed to me too exclusive. For a criticism of your thought in this field I suggest that you might write the editor of the JOURNAL OP ECONOMIC HISTORY, indicate that you have a manuscript of some 300 pages you would like to have read for a criticism, suggest a fee, and ask if he could name someone versed in economic doctrines who would give a professional estimate.

 I will leave the manuscript at your New York address early next week. It really was an adventure to read it.

                        Very sincerely yours,

                        /s/ Geoffrey Bruun

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Spencer Heath Archive

Letter to Heath from Geoffrey Bruun, 1618 Beverly Road, Brooklyn, New York (formerly history professor, New York University, 1927-1941 and book reviewer, Saturday Review of Literature)

September 8, 1945

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

It struck me, as I re-read my notes to you, written last night, that they are sadly mechanical and pedantic as criticism. They mark the intellectual response evoked by your CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, and the mind seeks to emphasize details, inconsistencies, fine distinctions, where the heart divines a unity.

 For the outstanding quality in your study is the high inspiration, the unselfish hope, which lights every page. It asks too much of humanity, but it is part of the search magnificent, the vision of a fairer world freed of torment and self-destroying feuds, factions, falsities. It is in the tradition of the great Utopians, and it prefigures a commonwealth, like Thomas More’s, in which the customs were so wise the people could not choose but be good. More was aware, no doubt, that taken literally, such an ideal would deny free will, unless all the citizens were in perfect accord with the law, and this blessed state had been found only in heaven before the revolt of the angels. Elsewhere, More wrote, “it is not possible for all things to be well, unless all men were good. Which I think will not be yet these good many years.”

 The dual nature of your study baffles the critic and classifier. In part it seems a sober program for a better socio-economic order, in part an apocalyptic vision, leaping into the empyrean. To the heart your large conceptions are moving and majestic — “only the brain perplexes and retards.”

Sincerely yours,

 /s/ Geoffrey Bruun

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Spencer Heath Archive

Letter to Heath from Geoffrey Bruun, 1618 Beverly Road, Brooklyn, New York (formerly history professor, New York University, 1927-1941 and book reviewer, Saturday Review of Literature)

September 16, 1945

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Yesterday I completed a second reading of your manuscript, CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. My respect for the scope and penetration of your analysis of social problems is in no way diminished since I wrote you my impressions on September 7.

 No two readers, it may be, would endorse all your formulas or concur in all your conclusions. But the skill of your dissection, the range of your discussion, the power, clarity and rhythm of your prose make this a remarkable achievement.

 As I told you previously, I do not feel competent to attempt to take the measure of a work of such ambitious scope. The thought is unconventional, the analogies most provocative. My impression as an individual reader is that this work is more deserving of publication and of thoughtful perusal than most of the books on social problems which I have seen in recent years.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

/s/ Geoffrey Bruun

 

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Geoffrey Bruun

NOTES AND COMMENTS ON

CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR

49. …the general rule of reproductivity being substantially inverse to longevity…  Do biologists acknowledge this?

 

Heath penciling:

“See Raymond Pearl — Ref to Davenport & Spencer”

Chapter II is written with particular beauty and persuasiveness.

Do you know the ideas of French thinkers of half a century ago on Solidarité? Writers like Léon Bourgeois strive to unite the scientific method and the moral idea.

75. I don’t know enough Physiological data to challenge these analogies, but I can’t help feeling they need confirmation here.

89. “…tyranny of a Pax Romana…”  Tyranny only in a sense, surely. More on this point later.

103. Alfred the Great ruled from 871-901. He was ninth not tenth century. Isn’t the judgment on the Normal conquest sweeping? Is your idealized picture of Saxon England (pp. 105, 158, 209) easily authenticated? A period “unique in history”? I question this happy picture.

Chap. 17. Are the transitions and governing causes of social change, as you indicate them here, borne out by the verdict of historians? Patriarchal Community to Slave State sounds plausible, but there is so much in this that remains a value judgment. See again below.

Chap. 21. Your analysis and prophecy of the benefits to be anticipated from a happy functioning of society is inspiring. May I submit the word synergy in this connection. But I must insist that reasoning by analogy from mechanics and physiology to society is not logical proof, however persuasive the metaphors.

(For a sober but factual attempt to gauge the efficiency of variant societies, see Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (Macmillan, 1940.)

147. The system of planets, suns and stars is not frictionless or inerrant. Cosmic dust and meteorites bombard all celestial bodies. Nor are stellar systems stable as you seem to imply. They are dispersing and converging and colliding and exploding. Your analogy (repeated on p. 151) of a social system resembling in stability and harmony a planetary system Is questionable, I think, because (1) biologic and stellar phenomena are not really comparable, and (2) animate and inanimate systems obey dissimilar laws and phases.

 

 Pause for pondering.

 

 You appear to predicate a pre-established harmony for happy, coordinated growth of all society. But surely someone gets pushed to the wall, and do they like it? Or is the ideal a society in which no one gets a hard deal.

 

         Heath underscores “no one” and pencils “Yes”

        

 If I follow your thought you postulate a norm of fair and rational trading as beneficial social energy flow. Does the concept survive application? Or is it a counsel of perfection? Trade in slaves, for instance, was profitable to seller, conveyer and purchaser, but morally monstrous. Exchanging beaver pelts with the Indians for fire water was dubious business. Selling weapons is good or bad depending on the use made of them which is not easily foreseen. How do the agents in an exchange know if it is socially beneficial or not?

170. “..the only pro-social and constructive public administration is that performed by landowners…” Is this literally meant or parable? What of doctors, jurists, engineers, teachers?

/Heath penciling:

“Reference is to public and community

 common services.”/

Chap. 24. What of corporate wealth. More people derive their livelihood from industry than from land in modern states.

220. You say a great deal is being done to lighten the burden of land owners, but elsewhere I gathered you saw government tyranny and taxation increasing and the land owner as the greatest victim.

221 ..”every dollar extracted by public servants…” But in a democracy people vote for the taxes they pay, approve a budget through Congress, and could block it. You say “..government… participates..forcibly..without making any present or subsequent return…” Literally? Later (223) you speak of “revenues for essential public services”. Are these fiscal extortion? Part of the time you seem almost to class governments officials with kidnappers, burglars, etc.

241. With this contrast between political authority and proprietary pattern of services you touch the gist of the whole issue do you not?  Isn’t the distinction between predacious government and proprietary service largely one of attitude? Because some citizens break speed laws we have speed cops to arrest them, courts to fine them — they pay thrice, in taxes, in fines, and in time. But these same citizens vote for the legislators who made the laws.

250. “This would realize in effect the socialist ideal.” The state would “wither away” – Marxist and anarchist doctrine, and in harmony, I think, with much evangelical thought.

255. Is the argument here an echo of 18th century hopes of human perfectibility?

284. Does the beehive or anthill deny the individual his fulfill­ment? Don’t all social organisms fulfill themselves and their component units, or aspire to? Leibniz Pre-established harmony and Monadology again suggests itself here.

 

Errata and typing slips.

 

180, line 9 from top, edception

191. yeilded (sic)
192. salable   saleable?

236, 1 line from bottom, thefinal  the final

172, 8 lines from bottom, “each other”  one another, if it

refers to more than two.  See also 174, line 9 from top.

267, line 6 from bottom, “neurons” neurones?

282, 2 lines from bottom, “hostaged”  as verb?

285, “most completed”  most nearly completed?

 mid page,”internatl”   internal?

291, 9 lines from top, “standing now…in poet’s dreams”

Is a verb omitted, or should the period be a comma?