As it happens I have come across a potential high profile posthumous recruit for the HSADL. Wiliam Durant.

Interestingly, Durant started out teaching at the anarchist Modern School in New York; he met his wife-to-be Ariel when she was a rollerskarting teenager there. (Anecdote: when they were married she was of legal age to be married but below the age of consent for sex, so the judge told them they were now married but instructed them not to consummate the marriage for two years. I suspect they may not have obeyed.)

Dain,

I’ve tried emailing you twice at your Auburn account and once through Center for Stateless Society.

I don’t see any email from you on my Auburn account, and I don’t have an email account through Center for a Stateless Society. Maybe try my Mises account? rlong at mises dot org

I’ve tried emailing you twice at your Auburn account and once through Center for Stateless Society. I have a paper nearly finished for IR.

Do you have a different contact?

Hope all is well,

Dain.

This sounds like another job for the “Herbert Spencer Anti-Defamation League”. To the Herb-mobile!!!

The main action of the HSADL seems to be defending HS from absurd, poorly researched complaints, almost all from leftists and liberals, that he advocated state enforced eugenics. The critics are basically echoing a meme rather than making any original comments based on primary sources. It’s cut and paste criticism.

Following your recent comments on Sheldon Richmond’s blog about Herbert Spencer’s unorthodox views on the factory system, obviously the HSADL needs to branch out into labour relations as well.

As it happens I have come across a potential high profile posthumous recruit for the HSADL. Wiliam Durant.

In Durant’s chapter on Herbert Spence in his “The Story of Philosophy” he has a chapter on Herb with a surprisiingly sympathetic conclusion. Durant noted that interest in Spencer had more or less dried up by the time he went to press (1926). Yet Durant predicts that interest in HS deserved to and would ultimately be revived. Here is Durant’s closing sentence:

“Some day, when the sting of opposition is forgotten, we shall do him better justice.”

11:52 PM
Delete

I can still see the whole letter

How about now?

Not any more!

In fact, there’s been alot of literature lately on the fact that it was people like Edmund Burke – and not modern liberal (left and right) heroes like John Stuart Mill – that were against imperialism most vigorously.

Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.

WTF???? Have they never even read Spencer? Justify colonialism and imperialism??? Is it possible to even misread Spencer and accidentally get this view?

How about now?

> [I just saw that the NYT won’t publish letters previously published, so check
> back here later.] <!–To the Editor: