Happy Birthday to three great anarchists: Murray Rothbard (yesterday), and William Godwin and Gustave de Molinari (today)!
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Happy Birthday, freedom fighters!
Should Godwin be considered a great freedom fighter? I admit that I am not directly familiar with any of his work but I remember there was a chapter devoted to him in Alexander Gray’s The Socialist Tradition.
His views on what people should do with their property I don’t think much of. (He thought market exchange was immoral and that people should freely share everything.) But his views on what people should be allowed to do with their property were quite libertarian.
Why aren’t captions included that would enable us to match the famous anarchists with their pictures?
David — Move your mouse over the pic, and if your browser cooperates, you should see the caption.
That’s of course consistent with the truth of, “There are no captions.” A lot of help you are!
Something about the end of winter/beginning of spring… That sounds like a good sign.
Godwin was also the first anarchist and one of the very few Enlightenment-era thinkers to attack the public school system (and since it was barely existent at the time, was prescient in foreseeing its evil effects) and advocate freedom in education.
BTW, didn’t Godwin become more pro-property over time? I think I’ve read that the material on property was changed in later editions of Political Justice to be more favorable to property than it was in the first edition (which the authors I was reading didn’t think was a good thing!)
http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2007/03/belated-wishes#comment-272