Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2805..

Typed draft of an incomplete letter to the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, Freedom Newspapers, Inc., 30 S. Prospect, Colorado Springs, CO, evidently to have been sent over the signature of Spencer MacCallum as Secretary of the Science of Society Foundation, publishers of Citadel, Market & Altar. Attached are scratch papers with wording not found in the typed working draft.

Summer 1957?

Gentlemen:

 

I have been extremely interested in your discussions of CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, by Spencer Heath, first in several columns by R.C. Hoiles and lately in an article on August 19th. I enjoyed the spirit of your latest article and would like to add some comments thereto.

 The first concerns Mr. Heath’s reference on page 14 to “the creative process and power of mankind that they do not as individuals possess, that comes to them only through their incor­poration into the social organism and their interfunctioning therein.”  The substance of your remarks is that Mr. Heath regards the whole as being greater than the sum of its parts, which you deny “both on philosophic and material grounds”, emphasizing that “individuals possess all the powers and all the creative processes.” The crux of the matter is Mr. Heath’s strict definition of Society, in which he rigidly separates the compulsive from the free in human relationships, and only dignifies as social those purely creative, voluntary relationships which arise in the free market. Almost universally have we identified “society” with “government” in our thinking, which (especially in view of the fascist use of the phrase “organic society”) makes libertarians want to cry down the thought that “society” has any proper functions. I think the fundamental truth you are voicing is that the State has no legiti­mate functions and powers.

 

 The principle that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts is perfectly correct in biology and in mechanics. A tractor has functions and powers that a pile of tractor parts does not. It similarly obtains in humans where the element of compulsion is excluded. A man could not build an automobile, a ship, a modern building alone from scratch. But these and more become commonplace as men conjoin in a free-enterprise relationship in which all are equal in authority over their own persons and properties. Mr. Heath points out that men thus spontaneously organized as society form the only level of life with the power to re-create its environment and make it progressively more habit­able for its own species, instead of ultimately exhausting or spoiling it.

 

 If the adjective “greater” is to be taken in any sense beyond recognition of the new functions which arise at the level of human free-enterprise cooperation, it must be taken not in the sense of a Caesar, of privileges and priorities, but of Christ’s counseling that he who would be greatest must first become the “servant of all.” For if we accept Mr. Heath’s Strict definition of society as a population the individuals of which are organized in a system of free-enterprise relationships, there arises no con­flict between the individual and society.

 Society is a goal only in the sense that free enterprise is as yet little developed. It is the natural means to the progressive liberation of the individual from the necessitous life to the exercise of the spirit and the fulfillment of his individual capacities and powers.

 Most people assume GOVERNMENT as a big something up there somewhere in front of them that will always exist, and their think­ing starts from there. The overwhelming virtue I find in CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR is precisely that it distinguishes sharply between society and government, between freedom and com­pulsion, between the Citadel and the Market. It predicts that society — men in free market relationships — will discover (and perhaps not until after they have grown into it empirically) an alternative, free-market way of providing their collective needs (defense, roads, etc.) without any need of taxes or politicians — in the same way that they have learned freely in recent centuries to provide their individual needs. In short, it anticipates an alternative to the whole system of taxes and politicians; it looks forward to a time when all of society will be organized along purely commercial lines. It sees the professed ideals of the Marxists — and the Marxist vision of the State withering away — coming true through the natural development of free-enterprise into the field of public affairs.

 

 In your eighth paragraph, you confuse a small but perhaps important aspect of the book’s thesis when you speak of the author’s emphasis upon “the necessity of land owners to undertake to provide ‘public’ service to non–land owners” (my italics). It should not be supposed that a corporation would discriminate against its own or any other corporation’s stockholders — much less if these included most of its customers. Indeed, the entire public might well become land owners in the corporate form of community organization Mr. Heath anticipates.

 Finally, I seriously question if Mr. Heath anywhere in these pages flirts with or lends comfort to any theory of taxation or expropriation of property, Georgist Single Tax or otherwise. The Single tax is no more acceptable to Mr. Heath than to yourselves.      etc.

 Your thoughtful spirit is refreshing, and you have contri­buted an outstanding service in giving such generous attention in your paper to CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, which must be one of the outstanding contributions to social thinking of our time.

/End of typed working draft/

________________________________________________________________

/Accompanying pieces of paper have wordings not found in the typed working draft:/

 

By meeting their material needs in this spontaneous way, men are increasingly freed as individuals to exercise the spirit — to realize themselves as individuals. For the goal of society, as described by Mr. Heath, is that all men shall become “artists.” A beautiful point that comes to mind in this respect is Mr. Heath’s identification of the free, contractual relationship with the practice of the golden rule, each person doing unto others in the same manner he would have them do unto him. Christ anticipated the practice of modern, world-wide capitalism when he said, “Do ye first the will of the Father .. and all these things shall be added unto you” — something Americans ought to have learned in the short history of our country!

__________________________________

 

You write without elaborating that, in the second part of the book, you “find the application, on several occasions, running counter to man’s individual freedom of choice.” I think it appropriate to remember that Mr. Heath offers no program to be imposed or enforced on society, but undertakes only to forecast the pattern society will take — upon the initiative of individuals acting freely in the market under profit motivation. So that the final judge of the general desirability, and hence of the correctness, of any part of this forecast will be the market itself, an institution which is ever shaping itself to increase rather than to diminish the range of free options of its members.

__________________________________

 

Finally, I seriously question if Mr. Heath anywhere in these pages flirts with or lends comfort to any theory of taxation or expropriation of property, Georgist or otherwise. If your readers discover differently, I promise to chew up and eat each guilty page from five separate copies of CITADEL, MARKET & ALTAR (to be paid for by me) — one copy for each time I have read this enormously provocative book.

___________________________________

 

You have contributed an outstanding service in giving such generous attention in your paper to CITADEL, MARKET & ALTAR, which a well-known economist friend once predicted would be “probably the most important non-best-selling book of the year.”

__________________________________

 

I am taking the liberty of enclosing two booklets by Spencer Heath from the Science of Society foundation that I trust you have not seen, one on Henry George, titled, “Why the Henry George Idea Does Not Prevail,” and the other addressed specifically to the mechanics of the organization of society along commercial lines that CITADEL, MARKET & altar anticipates for the future.

__________________________________

 

His first test of any principle is whether or not that principle stands to increase the range of desirable human options — which he identifies with freedom.

__________________________________

 

Hence familial and personal relationships are not “social” in his definition but belong in a third category of possible human relationships.