Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1969

Extensive pencil notes by Heath for a letter apparently to the University of Chicago Press urging publication of Citadel, Market and Altar.

No date

 

White envelope has items 1969-1971.

 

 

Dear Miss Florence:

 

     The University of Chicago and its press would like to blaze new trails through current confusions to the kind of new and wider knowledge that can realize wistful hopes and long cherished dreams. The common sciences — sciences that give knowledge of the environment of mankind, past and present, near and far, have made man the potential master and creator of his world — or the destroyer of all that he has made. He has opened wide the gates to knowledge, even to knowledge of himself as man and as limited families of men but not of himself as society, as widely and impersonally organized mankind.

     Particular and concrete knowledge is narrow and less potential than the general and abstract. The highest knowledge is the widest, but it is the last gained. There is much particular and concrete knowledge of organized mankind but how painfully little of the general and abstract! The factual data is abundant and profuse, but how meager the synthesis into generalized modes or process, into basic principles and laws the simple statement of which describes the operation of infinite particulars and details. It is in such wide and general formulations that men find their power to understand and to rebuild in the image of their thoughts the structures of their material world. And it is in the lack of such wide and simple knowledge that mankind is so far helpless to make avail of the beauty and the bounty that lies intrinsic and potential in the organization of his social world.

     In the manuscript herewith there is blazed a new trail. Society, the subject-matter of a new natural science, has been approached from the general and cosmic point of view. The conception and principles at the base of every other science have been invoked and boldly applied. First to describe the phenomenon as rhythmic energy; then to discover its quantitative and its concurrent qualitative transformations into more complex, enduring and life-advancing forms. Thus is (revealed) discovered the key principle and method of modern civilization’s rise, the quiet persistence of that principle, despite many obstacles, in the world of contract — private obligations, services and affairs, and the startling lack of conscious knowledge or application of that principle in the world of coercive relations and political power that dominates in mutual distrust all public and governmental affairs. The failure to abide in the freedom of contractual relations and to extend them into public affairs is found to be the frontier on which the growth and evolution of society must proceed. And the structural mechanism for that growth and development is found potential and ready to serve in the modern form of the institution of property in land.

     Thus is there brought to light the broad philosophic basis necessary to reveal the full significance of such eminently factual studies of modern regressive social trends as Belloc in his Servile State, von Mises’ Socialism, and your own Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Such admirable, scholarly protests and gravest warnings depend in the main on retrospect for their vindication. Only such positive generalization as discloses new or further possibilities can guide as well as warn. Modern liberalism from Rousseau to Gladstone, Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, proposed no positive philosophy of freedom but only that of moderation and protest against what it deemed the excesses of coercive or governmental power. This has been its weakness. It offered no transcendence but only mitigation and moderation of political tyranny. It could only grant appeasements to popular demands for progressive, government controls over evil conditions wrongly thought to be emergent from free relations themselves. It conceived freedom only as escape and had no thought of any contractual technique applicable in detail to the administration of public affairs. Thus it is more crushed between the weight of tory privileges from above and the rising pressure for counter-privileges and protection on behalf of those most distressed and those best organized to vote en bloc. Thus are public officers and bureaus /?/ subtly invested with the coercive powers in which the _____________ becomes enthroned.

     The manuscript herewith enriches the liberal ideology with a positive philosophy and points to the possibility of a dynamic yet exclusively contractual technique for the peaceful projection of free and non-coercive relations into the field of public services and thus the emancipation of free services and relationships alike from coercions from above and the consequent distresses on account of which they are further invoked.

     Needless to say, the transcendence of public coercion by free and profitable relations in public affairs would render force obsolete in favor of free contract and high profit to all interests in the administration of international affairs.

     Whatever considerations have favored your publication of such a valuable work as Professor Hayek’s recent volume should have at least equal if not great weight towards your enthusiastic publication of the manuscript here proposed.