The newest (March 2011) issue of The American Conservative features an article by Sheldon Richman titled “Libertarian Left: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.” It discusses, inter alia, the Center for a Stateless Society, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Roy Childs, Karl Hess, Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Gabriel Kolko, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, William Gillis, and your humble correspondent. It’s a great piece to use to introduce left-libertarian ideas to the neophyte. (It’s currently available online only to subscribers, alas.)
"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’m trying to find out when it will be generally available online.
This week or next it will be online for all.
What exactly is this doing in the America Conservative?
The editor asked for it.
“What exactly is this doing in the America Conservative?”
It’s new, it’s controversial, and it may help sell more subscriptions.
The American Conservative is definitely not The National Review or The Weekly Standard. It’s consistently friendly to antiwar sentiments, to libertarian ideas, to people like Bill Kauffman, even to something called “left-conservatism.” So finding this piece there really isn’t as much of a shock as you might think.
I think it’s my fifth article in the magazine.
Here are the others.
The link says “No results found.” Try this:
http://tinyurl.com/4uoyjce
I will check out the article the next time I go by the library.
The American Conservative is a unique market, but generally, it seems to me that left libertarians are wasting their time by trying to dialogue with right libertarians and conservatives. I am curious as to whether you have made any efforts or had any success in reaching out to the general anarchist community? I think left libertarians have a great deal to offer the movement in terms of intellectual rigor and general philosophical outlook.
We’ve reached out to lefties and righties, both anarchist and non.
Maybe it will turn out to be a waste of time talking to the AmCon readers, but the magazine invited the article.
Sheldon’s essay is now up here.
As for why the essay appears in The American Conservative, well, the editor has read Nock and Rothbard (as well as some Kevin Carson and Roderick Long). Since Sheldon wrote what I consider to be the definitive essay on the Old Right for the Independent Review a few years back, he seemed like a good choice to convey to our readers who the libertarian left really are.
We’ll have more from Sheldon in the future — and Kevin, Gary, and Roderick shouldn’t be surprised if I approach them about writing some day as well.
Excellent!