Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3189

Text of advertising copy and price list prepared by Spencer MacCallum under the title, “Creative Alternatives in Social Thought,” for four books By E.C. Riegel, Spencer Heath, and Spencer MacCallum

Sometime after 1984

 

E.C. Riegel, The New Approach to Freedom

Edited by Spencer H. MacCallum

Deluxe edition, gold-stamped, sewn cloth

binding, printed on non-acid paper, 111 pages     ……………………………………….        $14.95

 

This classic of individualist thought, privately printed by the author in 1949, is supplemented with eight previously unpublished essays. E.C. Riegel sensitively and yet uncompromisingly explores the meaning of indivi­dualism, the market, and economic democracy. He proposes as a new democratic principle the separation of money and state. More than any other single factor, he believes ignorance of the nature and functioning of money is responsible for the compromise of human freedom. Harry Browne says of this book: “The best explanation of the free market I’ve seen.”

 

 

E.C. Riegel,  Flight from Inflation: The Monetary Alternative

 

Edited by Spencer H. MacCallum and George Morton

Cloth cover with sewn binding, charts and diagrams,

Fold-out, index, 200 pages    ………………………………………………………..      $10.95

Paper  …………………………………………………………………………………        5.95

E.C. Riegel’s major work, published for the first time, containing the definitive exposition of his monetary ideas. Supplemented with five essays and selections from the author’s correspondence.

Concise and prophetic, this book exceeds by far the conventional limits of the discussion of money. With respect to inflation, it points out that there have been many infla­tions of individual national monetary units, but that in the past there always remained a relatively stable unit—the dollar in this century and the pound in the last—to which holders of vanishing units could take flight. This became the unit of account, enabling businesses to survive the extinction of their national unit. What we are now experi­encing, however, for the first time in history, is a global inflation with all of the national monetary units sliding into the sea. Riegel explains clearly the origins of the present world inflation and how a non-political monetary unit and system might be constructed before the world business community suffers a collapse.  He offers specific guidelines for such a unit and system, which would evolve competitively and not await political sanction or require political measures.

 

Spencer Heath, Citadel, Market & Altar: Emerging Society

Foreward by John Chamberlain

Sewn cloth binding, charts and diagrams, Index

278 pages. Designed and printed by Yale University Press  …………………………  $17.95

Readers looking for answers to the modern riddle of the Sphinx—how men of good will can carry on their public and common affairs in the same manner that they do their voluntary, private affairs—will find in this work a refreshing departure in social thinking.

The work divides into three parts: THE SCIENCE; APPLICA­TION; and GENERAL SURVEY. The author begins with the premise that all organization, living or non-living, owes its growth and continuity to the spontaneous, reciprocal relations among the units of which it is composed. In the light of this rule, pointing to freely-acting individuals as the units of enduring social organization, he lays the basis for a natural science of human society. On this foundation, he describes the autonomous operation of human society as a newly evolving organizational form.

The second part applies the general principles developed in the first. Analyzing the institution of property in land, he resolves the problem of the divergence between private and social costs in the provision of public services. He demonstrates the potential for the business community, specifically the real-estate industry, to provide public services at a profit through free, con­tractual engagements. The prospect, therefore, is to outgrow government as we know it.

 

     The final part develops the spiritual and psychological implications of the science and its application. While not stated as such, the happy effect of this discussion is to integrate two peculiarly American steams of thought — personal-enterprise, or free-market, economics, and the spiritual vision of the American transcendentalists epitomized in Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

     Proposing no political remedies but forecasting societal growth, this book traces a social vision of strength and beauty. John Chamberlain writes in the Foreward that the reader who comes to this book “will find a powerful mind freely playing over the whole realm of human activity. He will find in these pages many of those seed-ideas out of which books and social movements grow.”

 

 

Spencer H. MacCallum, The Art of Community

Sewn cloth binding, diagrams, Index, 118 pages   ………………………….  $10.00

Spencer MacCallum discusses hotels, shopping centers and other types of multiple-tenant income properties as specialized forms and useful models of natural community. He believes these “proprietary communities,” as successful, non-political arrangements evolving in the marketplace, may point the way toward an emerging society freely based on voluntary contracts among individuals, a social order that promises to transcend existing geographic, political and psychological boundaries. He shows in detail how, even as the political situation continues to deteriorate, we may be moving away from dependence on the political mode toward voluntary means of fulfilling all of the functions needed for an orderly and creative society.

The author has distilled in this book his experience and years of research in real-estate market analysis and allied fields. His training in social anthropology at the University of Chicago, supplemented by independent study in economics and philosophy, has produced a sophisticated per­spective that challenges many traditional assumptions about viable social arrangements.