Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2779

Review by Selim Tideman of Citadel, Market and Altar, The Henry George News, May 1958, page 15.

 

 

 

CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, by Spencer Heath,

The Science of Society Foundation, Inc.,

Balti­more, 1957. 259 pages.  $6

Reviewed by SELIM TIDEMAN

his imposing title of a new book, announced as dealing with the land question, attracted my atten­tion. The author draws an interesting parallel between the evolution of soci­etal relationships and the mass, motion and time concepts of the physical uni­verse. This is interesting, but he con­ceives of land values as being derived, apparently in their entirety, from asso­ciated public and community services.

All security comes from the conven­tion of property and the free contractual technique of the market. The ownership of land, the author affirms, is the foundation for security of pro­perty. Government, The Citadel, “needs to engage itself only with the preven­tion and punishment of force or equivalent fraud, and to accept the advantages of the contractual process in the performance of its public and community services. This social-izing of government itself cannot fail to follow upon discovery of the presently existing operation of property in land and resources as the democratic dis­tributive service through a contractual as opposed to a political and coercive process.”

Our current form of land ownership is said to confer a social service in distributing land for use. “It remains for land owners to take over the re­sponsibility of furnishing all the pub­lic services, and some that are now privately performed but could be im­proved, and thus serve their tenants. The rent that the land owners would collect would yield a profit and make the business desirable.”

 It is explained that to do this land owners will form large corporations, throwing in their individual interests. The shares of these corporations will be in demand as investments. The services rendered will not be merely public utilities but police protection etc. When the system is fully devel­oped, the landed citadel will be the government, beneficent, granting full freedom and protection to the people (as long as they pay the rent). The populace will be free to buy citadel shares in the stock market. This evi­dently means the ultimate merger of all landholding interests into one cor­poration, finally international in scope.

While the system was gaining as­cendency, it would be the landlord’s duty to protect the individual against government exactions and political knavery. Pending the time when land ownership is in complete control of the situation, this might be a difficult task. The owner would tax the tenant all the traffic would bear but might not collect enough to keep government out of the tenant’s pocket. Mr. Heath evidently believes that politics can be done away with and security purchased from a landed oligarchy.

The book bears the stamp of a man of culture and broad information even though its message seems almost face­tious. Incidentally, the author states that he is not making an attempt to answer “The ‘moral’ arguments and ponderous syllogisms of the early Herbert Spencer, Malthus, Ricardo and Henry George, which have a kind of formal symmetry within their pre­mised settings.” He does not believe in the subjectivity of an individual, “his ‘rights’ and desires, how he is supposed to feel about them or their supposed infringement. No social in­stitution,” he writes, “can be evalu­ated on such premises.” The discus­sion therefore “avoids both argument and refutation in its description of how, in a social organization, human services, public as well as private, are incorporated in property and distrib­uted by exchange.”