I have not abandoned my plan to blog my way through the Cato Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, but in the meantime, here’s a review by Roger Donway.
"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.
I can’t see why not.
Agreed. Also, Godwin’s views on property were more complicated then Donway’s quotation from Wendy makes it sound. He thought that a) people had a moral obligation to share their property with anyone who needed it, but also that b) it was morally wrong [apart from special circumstances] to interfere by force to make people share their property. As for his anti-family position, this was less extreme than the quotation suggests, and became even less so over time. (And it’s not as though Rand was a big booster of the family.) And while it’s true that Godwin thought human progress might eventually result in immortality and a dramatic triumph of mind over matter, it’s not as though he saw this as mechanically resulting from the abolition of property and the family.
Godwin’s ethics would seem to fall under the banner of intrincism criticized by Rand.
Many people need greater wealth, but that doesn’t mean every individual person can rationally assist them under any context. The way out is to develop a context sensitive concept of charity — not to mention a clear definition of what constitutes need. Otherwise, a person can morally demand anything and everything from you whenever — AIG “needed” our money, no?
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AIG would fall under the banner of force…
As joint equals of a liberal polity, they may merit assistance. As politically connected extortionists; they earn our ire ( :