Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3041

Pages 1-2 in pencil (crossed out) and 5-6 in pen, fragmentary draft of Heath’s final will.

No date

 

 

Pp 1-2

The mode of this research has been and continues to be to examine the literature and conditions relating to all voluntary relationships among men whereby they survived, with special reference to their non-political and non-coercive modes of association and to seek among these known but perhaps neglected factual materials of history new understandings not merely to present day survival but to positive advance into freedom and power.

     This work of the foundation has been to collect data and in both printed and verbal form to publicize some of its all-time significance perhaps heretofore insufficiently observed.

     My own background for this research began with a youthful enthusiasm for the natural sciences, followed by bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from the National University, in Washington DC (now George Washington), and successful practice in that city until 1912. From then until 1929 I was engaged in engineering and

 

Pp 5-6

.. Society and It’s Services, Politics versus Proprietorship (first published in 1936) and Progress and Poverty Reviewed. These and other lesser publications formed the basis for the manuscript of Citadel, Market and Altar which was published in 1957 as a research report by the Science of Society Foundation after its formal incorporation in 1956. This report follows the method of research proposed in the notable series of lectures given at the University of Chicago in 1937 by Visiting Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Chairman of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, but not published until 1957.

     These lectures, now published under the title, A Natural Science of Society, afford example of scientific method and research basically the same as my own.

(Continue here from top of page 4 — typed original — to end on page 6)