Spencer Heath

Item 3166

Typed transcription by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at the Winchester Memorial Hospital, Winchester VA

June 22, 1955

 

 

ON LOOKING INTO DE TOCQUEVILLB’S

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

The more I read and think, the more historical support there is for a very original and early, primitive, proprietary community administration, and the more overwhelming the evi­dence becomes that the elements of that primitive still abiding with us is all that we have between us and totalitarian slavery. And the future, normally functioning social organism will be in the image of and the development of this primitive form of freedom in which all free society is born, and in which form it must have its fulfillment.

That is all preambulatory to what I have been thinking about since yesterday.  Innumerable persons besides Tocqueville, even our current pundits, are constantly referring to the basic community as the root from which all national and international freedom must flow. Truth is divined without being understood. The case in point is the New England town-meeting, especially as described with much detail by Count de Tocqueville. Like most of our learned men, he seems to know nothing about ancient tenures (and feudal organization? interruption). He intimates importance, however, to the fact that many of the land titles in early America were not derived by the occupier from the king or from any superior than the spontaneous consent of his neighbors, thus from society itself. He accounts for this having been possible because the Anglo-American settlers were already socially mature. They had been through the long racial apprenticeship necessary to acquire an instinct for allocating property by non-violent processes and respecting such allocations. This, he said, is best exemplified in the New England town.

He regards the inhabitants of the town, presumably the body of owners, as an integrated social organism in which the members are interrelated in such manner as to keep them and their relationship alive.

Tocqueville saw this social organism in its new setting much as he saw the single, isolated pioneer: the sole func­tion was maintenance, that is, keeping alive. He intimates that all the members were property owners. He tells us that they cooperated most particularly with respect to those things which they had in common — which, of course, constituted their place, a community. Only when people cooperate with respect to the things they have in common can they cooperate with re­spect to those things which they must have in common. And each man was the prime owner and beneficiary and consumer of the products which his labor wrested from the land.

Here’s a great parallel, Spencer. A pioneer wrests something from the land and consumes it; no social relations are involved. (of course, your damned sociologist would say he had a wife, didn’t he, and he had social relationships with her, didn’t he? — Because anything is sociology for them: even the fox has social relationships if you bring it down to that level.) No man was necessarily at work to supply anybody but himself. No exchange economy had developed. But as fast as men began to specialize and provide things for the benefit of others by the way of exchange, and only indirectly for his own benefit, he had so far converted his property into capital instead of consumer’s goods, and in that way a germ of the capitalistic exchange system was born.  Any owner, alone or jointly with a few others, could supply specialized goods and services to the community membership at large. And so far as each member maintained his own real property, there was no occasion to levy upon anyone else to support it. The only occasion to levy on property was for those services which were common to all the properties, and this is where the Anglo-American psychology had not sufficiently evolved. For it was necessary to have a common fund to perform the common services, but while the several owners of the several parts of the community were not organized, while the old individual interests by metes and bounds instead of undivided interests in the whole, they were obliged to accept the services of conquering or ruling persons to administer the common services for want of any adequate organization of their own. It was for lack of adequate organization among the owner-occupants so as to use their properties as capital instead of mere consumers’ facilities that coercive politics came in.

If you look at any human relationships that are success­ful, not statically but as a stage in the time dimension of development, we can see the constant coming of the organic free society