Lew Rockwell interviewed me for a couple of brief podcasts this (Thursday) morning; the first one, on anarchism, is up now. (The second one, on the Giant Squid Menace, will be released when the public is ready for it ….)
"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.
Dang, I was just about to put this in the comments of one of the other posts. I didn’t expect you’d be up after 2 in the morning…
It was only 1 in the morning; I’m on Central time, but my blog for some reason is on Eastern time.
The interview was good.
I will refrain from commenting on the stuff surrounding the interview.
But that’s the most exciting part!
Wow, it took you twelve years to go from libertarian to anarchist?
In my case, I became a Constitutionalist in Oct. 07 and was an anarchist by Jan. 08 – three months!
I suppose this is good news for anarchism, because it means the literature is becoming more available and widespread thanks to the internet.
We could actually measure our progress by the average time needed to convert someone to anarchism. Now to whittle that three months down to a week… which shouldn’t be that difficult seeing as the whole Constitutionalist/limited government/minarchist path to anarchism is just a wasteful detour.
You need three points to make a line . . . I believe I took about six months to go from libertarian to anarchist (June to December 2000 or thereabouts).
Speaking of monopolies on force, here’s an interesting story for people who think government is natural or inevitable:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081116/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_bloodied_south
The article drips with unintentional irony. The most bizarre quote is when an Italian official characterizes mafia practices as “Kill 1 person to teach a lesson to 100″. Gee, so that’s nothing like this or this.
I don’t exactly have an exact date when I made the conversions, but if I recall correctly it probably took me about 6 months to a year. It will be about my one year anarchist anniversary soon.