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A Note on the Treatment of Libertarians in Intellectual History

By on June 18, 2008 1

I found this fragment in some undated notes I was making for a blog post. I now have no idea for what context the following remarks were intended, so I thought I’d put them up on their own:

Say is made a disciple of Smith, and Hodgskin a disciple of Ricardo, though each was an independent thinker and quite critical of his supposed mentor. Spencer is dubbed a “Social Darwinist,” despite anticipating Darwin by several years. Bastiat is called a mere populariser, his original contributions overlooked; the individualist anarchists are treated as mere footnotes to Stirner, despite the fact that most of them (even Tucker) formed their views independently of Stirner. Rand is dismissed as a vulgariser of Nietzsche, while Rothbard, in a chronological reversal, has been described as a follower of Nozick.

Immanuel Kant’s Howdy Duty Show

By on June 18, 2008 1

Actually this has nothing to do with Kant, it’s just a grab bag of random stuff:

Hurray for the Belgians! Not only did they pioneer market anarchism (with Molinari and de Puydt), but they also pioneered the internet. (Conical hat tip to LRC.)

helmet of liberty - don't sit on me Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel: an enjoyable piece (and how many American politicians could write so well?), but a bad analogy: choosing whether to impose a constraint on oneself and choosing whether to impose a constraint on others are not liberty/security trade-offs in anything close to the same sense.

Farther north, left-libertarian science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod points out a few problems with Christopher Hitchens’ atheist manifesto.

And on this side of the Atlantic: the joys of bureaucracy.

Also take a look at the percentage of the united states that is subject to federal land monopoly.

Finally, two items about the skewed perceptions of the Associated Press: first, they think they have the authority to make IP restrictions even tighter than the government’s; second, they think a species isn’t extinct when biologists say so; it’s only extinct when bureaucrats say so. (So the AP hierarchy is: science; above that, the state; above that, the AP.)

Subversive Signage

By on June 17, 2008 6

Anyone who’s planning to protest the Democratic and/or Republican conventions and is looking for a poster slogan is welcome to this one:

Abolish the Presidency

Or a talkier one, if you prefer:

Abolish the Presidency - Grown-Ups Don't Need A President

Of course we’re against all government, not just the presidency; but this might be an interesting conversation-starter (and, to borrow a beloved phrase of the gun-control crowd, a “reasonable first step”). And if people ask you “But without a president, who would run the country?” the very fact that people say things like that is yet another argument for abolishing the presidency.

Sudha Shenoy R.I.P.

By on June 17, 2008 2

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power and Mises Blog]

Sudha Shenoy preparing to rip your argument to shreds I was very sad to learn of Sudha Shenoy’s death [see here and here]. I didn’t know her well, but we spoke a few times at Mises Institute events (or on the Atlanta airport shuttle) and interacted on the L&P blog. She was a terrific economic historian, a radical libertarian, an inexhaustible fount of information (ask her a question and she would reply with a meticulous bibliography), with a witty and incisive mind disinclined to let b.s. pass unscathed.

In particular, I owe to Sudha the two following bits of information about her mentor Hayek:

1. Late in life Hayek once said that if he were younger, he would be a free-market anarchist.

2. Trusting Hayek’s notoriously unreliable memory, most writers have taken at face value his claim that he was never Mises’ student in the official sense, i.e., never enrolled in his university courses. But Sudha pointed out to me that Hayek’s grade book (reproduced on p. 13 of John Raybould’s Hayek: A Commemorative Album) bears the signatures of his professors, including Mises.

Sous les Pavés, la Plage!

By on June 17, 2008 0

Orange Beach The Alabama Philosophical Society will be meeting in Orange Beach, September 26-27. For information about paper submissions, hotel registration, or the undergraduate essay contest, see the website.

Get Your Hands Off My Spencer!

By on June 17, 2008 10

Herbert Spencer and Jonah Goldberg Joel Schlosberg tells me I’m cited in Jonah Goldberg’s one-sided screed Liberal Fascism (a book that, I gather, quite correctly points out the fascist aspects of the statist left but studiously ignores those of the statist right). Apparently Goldberg has some kind words for Herbert Spencer on pp. 257-8:

Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong with classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist – he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” – but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good – albeit classical – liberal: he championed charity, women’s suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigeur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing “greed,” and even the Holocaust.

And then there’s a footnote to my LRC article “Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues.”

I’m glad Goldberg likes Spencer, I guess; but I’m not sure why he does. As a cheerleader for war, censorship, colonialism, torture, and dictatorship, and an inveterate foe of libertarianism (incidentally, the libertarian he refers to in that last article was my student), Goldberg ought to hate everything Spencer stood for.

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