Austro-Athenian Empire » Industriels

Mr. Orchardson, I’m Ready For My Close-up

Roderick — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:56:02 +0000

This painting, Quiller Orchardson’s 1882 Voltaire (which I saw in Edinburgh’s National Gallery on my 2006 trip), is one of my favourites; but I wouldn’t blame you for wondering why, for this rather indistinct print – the best one I could find online – scarcely does it justice. (Click to see it slightly larger.)

The painting illustrates the following famous anecdote:

One night at the Opéra the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, of the famous and powerful family of the Rohans, a man of forty-three, quarrelsome, blustering, whose reputation for courage left something to be desired, began to taunt the poet upon his birth …. To which the retort came quickly, “Whatever my name may be, I know how to preserve the honour of it.” The Chevalier muttered something and went off, but the incident was not ended. Voltaire had let his high spirits and his sharp tongue carry him too far, and he was to pay the penalty. …

Voltaire, dining at the Duc de Sully’s, where, we are told, he was on the footing of a son of the house, received a message that he was wanted outside in the street. He went out, was seized by a gang of lackeys, and beaten before the eyes of Rohan, who directed operations from a cab. …

The sequel is known to everyone: how Voltaire rushed back, dishevelled and agonised, into Sully’s dining-room, how he poured out his story in an agitated flood of words, and how that high-born company, with whom he had been living up to that moment on terms of the closest intimacy, now only displayed the signs of a frigid indifference. The caste-feeling had suddenly asserted itself. Poets, no doubt, were all very well in their way, but really, if they began squabbling with noblemen, what could they expect?

There’s more to the story. When Rohan subsequently learned that Voltaire was practicing his fencing, he heroically arranged to have Voltaire arrested and exiled without trial – an event that resulted in one of the classics of the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s Letters from England, so it was all worth it from our point of view, if not perhaps from Voltaire’s.

This painting depicts the moment when Voltaire (right) has just been beaten up by Rohan’s thugs outside and is asking his patron and supposed friend the Duc de Sully (slumped passively in his chair, left) and his aristocratic associates to bear witness on his behalf, only to be met with their indifference and contempt. One might call it Voltaire’s moment of radicalisation.

What you can’t see in this reproduction is the fiery indignation in Voltaire’s face: not Voltaire the courtier but Voltaire the fighter. That’s the most notable feature of the painting when one sees it in person, and it’s just completely invisible here; only a close-up could really convey the proper effect that makes it my favourite Voltaire portrait.

So if you’re in Edinburgh, I recommend a visit; as I recall, it was on the basement level, down the left-hand ramp as one enters.

Steal This Blog!

Roderick — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:03:29 +0000

My comments for the upcoming Molinari Society session in New York this coming week are now online.

I can’t remember if I ever posted that paper on Nozick and class conflict that I presented at the last Alabama Philosophical Society meeting, but if not, that’s online too.

Not Peace But a Sword

Roderick — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:06:12 +0000

The very first Nobel Peace Prize was given to a libertarian economist and peace activist.

A few years later, they started giving it to mass murderers.

The latter tradition seems to be the one they’ve chosen to continue.

Taoists! Thomists! Turgot!

Roderick — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:27:46 +0000

Or, if you prefer: Daoists! Dominicans! Donisthorpe!

Rothbard’s fascinating Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, which weighs in at over a thousand pages and still, ironically, never gets as far as the Austrians themselves (Rothbard died before completing it), is now available online from Mises.org in two honkin’ enormous PDF files: Volume One and Volume Two. (In addition, the hard copy, which I bought back when it cost a million dollars or thereabouts, is currently available for $47.)

One of the highlights of Rothbard’s history is his resurrection of numerous important thinkers who have unjustly been relegated to the footnotes as “minor figures.” Most histories of economics start with Adam Smith (perhaps with a brief nod to the mercantilists and physiocrats) and run quickly through Ricardo and a few other Classicals to Marx and then the marginalist revolution. Rothbard, by contrast, takes 400 pages to get to Smith, exploring in particular the contributions of the Scholastics (who, contrary to prevailing myths, Rothbard shows to be insightful pioneers of subjectivist methodology and free-market thought). He also rescues the French liberal tradition from its traditional mere-popularisers-of-Adam-Smith ghetto – thus resuscitating the entire neglected tradition of Continental liberalism that runs from Salamanca through Paris to Vienna.

There’s stuff to disagree with, of course: for example, Rothbard wrongly dismisses the Confucians as mere statists, and oddly claims that the “Hellenistic and Roman epochs were virtually devoid of economic thought” (despite the Stoics’ important work on commerce and property rights, the Epicureans’ theories of spontaneous social order, and nearly all the Greco-Roman thinkers’ exploration of praxeology as the base of their ethical systems); he entirely misinterprets Montaigne’s claim that one person’s gain is another’s loss, and arguably misses the nuances of Montaigne’s attitude toward royal authority; he’s weirdly unfair to Adam Smith (e.g., characterising Smith’s philosophy as a “dour Calvinism” that “scorns man’s consumption and pleasure” – when in fact Smith was a deist and anti-Christian who condemned ambition for making us substitute “toil” and “anxiety” for “leisure” and “ease”! – and attributing to Smith the belief that the “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” is “irrational and innate,” despite Smith’s explicit statement to the contrary); and his account of Plotinus and the Gnostics is wrong from start to finish (you’d never guess from reading Rothbard that Plotinus was an opponent of the Gnostics). There are also some puzzling omissions: no mention, e.g., of Godwin and almost none of Proudhon – and the section on the Greeks says nothing about the Platonic (or possibly pseudo-Platonic) dialogues Hipparchus and Eryxias, two of the earliest and most insightful discussions of the nature of profit and wealth. So, gripe gripe gripe.

But the book’s virtues far outweigh its defects (and understating Smith’s originality and devotion to laissez-faire is at least a useful corrective to the more frequent tendency to overstate these).

Check out the table of contents:

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

Volume I: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith

Chapter 1. The first philosopher-economists: the Greeks

1.1 The natural law
1.2 The politics of the polis
1.3 The first ‘economist’: Hesiod and the problem of scarcity
1.4 The pre-Socratics
1.5 Plato’s right-wing collectivist utopia
1.6 Xenophon on household management
1.7 Aristotle: private property and money
1.8 Aristotle: exchange and value
1.9 The collapse after Aristotle
1.10 Taoism in ancient China

Chapter 2. The Christian Middle Ages

2.1 The Roman law: property rights and laissez faire
2.2 Early Christian attitudes toward merchants
2.3 The Carolingians and canon law
2.4 Canonists and Romanists at the University of Bologna
2.5 The canonist prohibition of usury
2.6 Theologians at the University of Paris
2.7 The philosopher-theologian: St. Thomas Aquinas
2.8 Late thirteenth century scholastics: Franciscans and utility theory

Chapter 3. From Middle Ages to Renaissance

3.1 The great depression of the fourteenth century
3.2 Absolutism and nominalism: the break-up of Thomism
3.3 Utility and money: Buridan and Oresme
3.4 The odd man out: Heinrich von Langenstein
3.5 Usury and foreign exchange in the fourteenth century
3.6 The worldly ascetic: San Bernardino of Siena
3.7 The disciple: Sant’ Antonino of Florence
3.8 The Swabian liberals and the assault on the prohibition of usury
3.9 Nominalists and active natural rights

Chapter 4. The late Spanish scholastics

4.1 The commercial expansion of the sixteenth century
4.2 Cardinal Cajetan: liberal Thomist
4.3 The School of Salamanca: the first generation
4.4 The School of Salamanca: Azpilcueta and Medina
4.5 The School of Salamanca: the middle years
4.6 The late Salamancans
4.7 The learned extremist: Juan de Mariana
4.8 The last Salamancans: Lessius and de Lugo
4.9 The decline of scholasticism
4.10 Parting shots: the storm over the Jesuits

Chapter 5. Protestants and Catholics

5.1 Luther, Calvin, and state absolutism
5.2 Luther’s economics
5.3 The economics of Calvin and Calvinism
5.4 Calvinists on usury
5.5 Communist zealots: the Anabaptists
5.6 Totalitarian communism in Münster
5.7 the roots of messianic communism
5.8 Non-scholastic Catholics
5.9 Radical Huguenots
5.10 George Buchanan: radical Calvinist
5.11 Leaguers and politiques

Chapter 6. Absolutist thought in Italy and France

6.1 The emergence of absolutist thought in Italy
6.2 Italian humanism: the republicans
6.3 Italian humanism: the monarchists
6.4 ‘Old Nick’: preacher of evil or first value-free political scientist?
6.5 The spread of humanism in Europe
6.6 Botero and the spread of Machiavellianism
6.7 Humanism and absolutism in France
6.8 The sceptic as absolutist
6.9 Jean Bodin: apex of absolutist thought in France
6.10 After Bodin

Chapter 7. Mercantilism: serving the absolute state

7.1 Mercantilism as the economic aspect of absolutism
7.2 Mercantilism in Spain
7.3 Mercantilism and Colbertism in France
7.4 Mercantilism in England: textiles and monopolies
7.5 Enserfdom in eastern Europe
7.6 Mercantilism and inflation

Chapter 8. French mercantilist thought in the seventeenth century

8.1 Building the ruling elite
8.2 The first major French mercantilist: Barthélemy de Laffemas
8.3 The first ‘Colbert’: the duc de Sully
8.4 The eccentric poet: Antoine de Montchr&eacute:tien
8.5 The grandiose failure of François du Noyer
8.6 Under the rule of the cardinals, 1624-61
8.7 Colbert and Louis XIV
8.8 Louis XIV: apogee of absolutism (1638-1714)

Chapter 9. The liberal reaction against mercantilism in seventeenth century France

9.1 The croquants’ rebellion
9.2 Claude Joly and the fronde
9.3 A single tax
9.4 Rising opposition to collectivism by merchants and nobles
9.5 The merchants and the council of commerce
9.6 Marshal Vauban: royal engineer and single taxer
9.7 Fleury, Fénélon, and the Burgundy circle
9.8 The laissez-faire utilitarian: the Seigneur de Belesbat
9.9 Boisguilbert and laissez-faire
9.10 Optimistic handbook at the turn of the century

Chapter 10. Mercantilism in freedom in England from the Tudors to the Civil War

10.1 Tudor and Stuart absolutism
10.2 Sir Thomas Smith: mercantilist for sound money
10.3 The ‘economic liberalism’ of Sir Edward Coke
10.4 The ‘bullionist’ attack on foreign exchange, and on the East India trade
10.5 The East India apologists strike back
10.6 Prophet of ‘empiricism’: Sir Francis Bacon
10.7 The Baconians: Sir William Petty and ‘political arithmetic’

Chapter 11. Mercantilism in freedom in England from the Civil War to 1750

11.1 The Perryites: Davenant, King, and ‘the law of demand’
11.2 Liberty and property: the Levellers and Locke
11.3 Child, Locke, the rate of interest, and the coinage
11.4 The North brothers, deductions from axioms, and Tory laissez-faire
11.5 The inflationists
11.6 The hard-money response
11.7 Laissez-faire by mid-century: Tucker and Townshend

Chapter 12. The founding father of modern economics: Richard Cantillon

12.1 Cantillon the man
12.2 Methodology
12.3 Value and price
12.4 Uncertainty and the entrepreneur
12.5 Population theory
12.6 Spatial economics
12.7 Money and process analysis
12.8 International monetary relations
12.9 The self-regulation of the market
12.10 Influence

Chapter 13. Physiocracy in mid-eighteenth century France

13.1 The sect
13.2 Laissez-faire and free trade
13.3 Laissez-faire forerunner: the marquis d’Argenson
13.4 Natural law and property rights
13.5 The single tax on land
13.6 ‘Objective’ value and cost of production
13.7 The Tableau économique
13.8 Strategy and influence
13.9 Daniel Bernoulli and the founding of mathematical economics

Chapter 14. The brilliance of Turgot

14.1 The man
14.2 Laissez-faire and free trade
14.3 Value, exchange and price
14.4 The theory of production and distribution
14.5 The theory of capital, entrepreneurship, savings and interest
14.6 Theory of money
14.7 Influence
14.8 Other French and Italian utility theorists of the eighteenth century

Chapter 15. The Scottish Enlightenment

15.1 The founder: Gershom Carmichael
15.2 Francis Hutcheson: teacher of Adam Smith
15.3 The Scottish Enlightenment and Presbyterianism
15.4 David Hume and the theory of money

Chapter 16. The celebrated Adam Smith

16.1 The mystery of Adam Smith
16.2 The life of Smith
16.3 The division of labour
16.4 Productive vs. unproductive labour
16.5 The theory of value
16.6 The theory of distribution
16.7 The theory of money
16.8 The myth of laissez-faire
16.9 On taxation

Chapter 17. The spread of the Smithian movement

17.1 The Wealth of Nations and Jeremy Bentham
17.2 The influence of Dugald Stewart
17.3 Malthus and the assault on population
17.4 Resistance and triumph in Germany
17.5 Smithianism in Russia
17.6 The Smithian conquest of economic thought

Volume II: Classical Economics

Chapter 1. J. B. Say: the French tradition in Smithian clothing

1.1 The Smithian conquest of France
1.2 Say, de Tracy and Jefferson
1.3 The influence of Say’s Traiteé
1.4 The method of praxeology
1.5 Utility, productivity and distribution
1.6 The entrepreneur
1.7 Say’s laws of markets
1.8 Recession and the storm over Say’s law
1.9 The theory of money
1.10 The state and taxation

Chapter 2. Jeremy Bentham: the utilitarian as big brother

2.1 From laissez-faire to statism
2.2 Personal utilitarianism
2.3 Social utilitarianism
2.4 Big brother: the panopticon

Chapter 3. James Mill, Ricardo, and the Ricardian system

3.1 James Mill, the radicals’ Lenin
3.2 Mill and libertarian class analysis
3.3 Mill and the Ricardian system
3.4 Ricardo and the Ricardian system, I: macro-income distribution
3.5 Ricardo and the Ricardian system, II: the theory of value
3.6 The law of comparative advantage

Chapter 4. The decline of the Ricardian system, 1820-48

4.1 The conundrum of Ricardo’s popularity
4.2 The rapid decline of Ricardian economics
4.3 The theory of rent
4.4 Colonel Perronet Thompson: anti-Ricardian Benthamite
4.5 Samuel Bailey and the subjective utility theory of value
4.6 Nassau Senior, the Whately connection, and utility theory
4.7 William Forster Lloyd and utility theory in England
4.8 A utility theorist in Kentucky
4.9 Wages and profits
4.10 Abstinence and time in the theory of profits
4.11 John Rae and the ‘Austrian’ theory of capital and interest
4.12 Nassau Senior, praxeology, and John Stuart Mill

Chapter 5. Monetary and banking thought, I: the early bullionist controversy

5.1 The restriction and the emergence of the bullionist controversy
5.2 The bullionist controversy continues
5.3 Boyd’s Letter to Pitt
5.4 The storm over Boyd: the anti-bullionist response
5.5 Henry Thornton: anti-bullionist in sheep’s clothing
5.6 Lord King: the culmination of bullionism
5.7 The Irish currency question
5.8 The emergence of mechanistic bullionism: John Wheatley

Chapter 6. Monetary and banking thought, II: the bullion Report and the return to gold

6.1 Ricardo enters the fray
6.2 The storm over the bullion Report
6.3 Deflation and the return to gold
6.4 Questioning fractional-reserve banking: Britain and the US
6.5 Monetary and banking thought on the Continent

Chapter 7. Monetary and banking thought, III: the struggle over the currency school

7.1 The trauma of 1825
7.2 The emergence of the currency principle
7.3 Rechartering the Bank of England
7.4 The crisis of 1837 and the currency school controversy
7.5 The crisis of 1839 and the escalation of the currency school controversy
7.6 The renewed threat to the gold standard
7.7 Triumph of the currency school: Peel’s act of 1844
7.8 Tragedy in triumph for the currency school: the aftermath
7.9 De facto victory for the banking school
7.10 Currency and banking school thought on the Continent

Chapter 8. John Stuart Mill and the reimposition of Ricardian economics

8.1 Mill’s importance
8.2 Mill’s strategy and the success of the Principles
8.3 The theory of value and distribution
8.4 The shift to imperialism
8.5 The Millians
8.6 Cairnes and the gold discoveries
8.7 The Millian supremacy

Chapter 9. Roots of Marxism: messianic communism

9.1 Early communism
9.2 Secularized millennial communism: Mably and Morelly
9.3 The conspiracy of the Equals
9.4 The burgeoning of communism

Chapter 10. Marx’s vision of communism

10.1 Millennial communism
10.2 Raw communism
10.3 Higher communism and the eradication of the division of labour
10.4 Arriving at communism
10.5 Marx’s character and his path to communism

Chapter 11. Alienation, unity, and the dialectic

11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology
11.2 Hegel and the man-God
11.3 Hegel and politics
11.4 Hegel and the Romantic Age
11.5 Marx and Left revolutionary Hegelianism
11.6 Marx as utopian

Chapter 12. The Marxian system, I: historical materialism and the class struggle

12.1 The Marxian strategy
12.2 Historical materialism
12.3 The class struggle
12.4 The Marxian doctrine of ‘ideology’
12.5 The inner contradiction in the concept of ‘class’
12.6 The origin of the concept of class
12.7 The legacy of Ricardo
12.8 Ricardian socialism

Chapter 13. The Marxian system, II: the economics of capitalism and its inevitable demise

13.1 The labour theory of value
13.2 Profit rates and ‘surplus value’
13.3 The ‘laws of motion’, I: the accumulation and centralization of capital
13.4 The ‘laws of motion’, II: the impoverishment of the working class
13.5 The ‘laws of motion’, III: business cycle crises

13.5.1 Underconsumptionism
13.5.2 The falling rate of profit
13.5.3 Disproportionality

13.6 Conclusion: the Marxian system

Chapter 14. After Mill: Bastiat and the French laissez-faire tradition

14.1 The French laissez-faire school
14.2 Frederic Bastiat: the central figure
14.3 The influence of Bastiat in Europe
14.4 Gustave de Molinari, first anarcho-capitalist
14.5 Vilfredo Pareto, pessimistic follower of Molinari
14.6 Academic convert in Germany: Karl Heinrich Rau
14.7 The Scottish maverick: Henry Dunning Macleod
14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe
14.9 Bastiat and laissez-faire in America
14.10 Decline of laissez-faire thought

Hodgskin, Lum, and Molinari Online

Roderick — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:37:38 +0000

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’ve just posted an 1842 work by English individualist anarchist Thomas Hodgskin titled Peace, Law, and Order; Hodgskin objects to the common conjoining of these three terms, on the grounds that law is the greatest threat to peace and order, not their guarantor.

I’ve also finished posting American mutualist Dyer Lum’s 1890 Economics of Anarchy, along with a shorter work by Lum from 1887 titled On Anarchy. These works deal with many of the same issues as Tandy’s book, though Lum is a bigger fan of cooperative association than Tandy and is not quite as firmly committed to nonviolent methods.

Elsewhere in the libersphere, Shawn Wilbur has also located and posted an 1890 anti-tariff piece by battlin’ Belgian Gustave de Molinari titled “The McKinley Bill in Europe.”

Molinari in The Economist

Roderick — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:03:02 +0000

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Gustave de Molinari, pioneer of market anarchism, gets a couple of mentions in The Economist; see the Molinari Institute news page for details.

Celebrity Death Match: Bastiat vs. Proudhon

Roderick — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:17:24 +0000

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

In 1849, France’s leading spokesman for libertarian “capitalism” (Frédéric Bastiat) and France’s leading spokesman for libertarian “socialism” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) exchanged a series of public letters debating the nature and legitimacy of charging interest on loans.

In 1879, American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker translated most of the letters, which were then published serially in the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator – whereupon, apart from a few excerpts, they vanished henceforth from human sight.

I’ve managed to track down a copy of the Irish World in microform and transcribe Tucker’s translation. Where the microform was too dark to read (it was really a lousy copy) I made educated guesses based on the French original, marking my conjectures in brackets. I’ve also translated two additional letters not included in Tucker’s translation, and thrown in an anonymous public-domain translation of Bastiat’s earlier criticism of Proudhon (which was what sparked off the debate to begin with). As of today, the whole thing is now, finally, online as The Bastiat-Proudhon Debate on Interest.

Most of this debate has not been widely available in English since 1879; and parts of it (including Bastiat’s final reply to Proudhon) have never been translated into English until now.

So who wins? Well, in my view, neither one – the two thinkers persistently talk past each other. I’ve posted a fuller analysis here; I’ll also be presenting this material at the Austrian Scholars Conference later this week.

Anarchist Birthday Trifecta

Roderick — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:30:31 +0000

Happy Birthday to three great anarchists: Murray Rothbard (yesterday), and William Godwin and Gustave de Molinari (today)!

Online: Molinari on Religion!

Roderick — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:38:32 +0000

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Only two of Molinari’s books have been translated into English – The Society of Tomorrow (badly – the translation is quite incompetent) and Religion (incompletely – the editor explains that “it was found necessary to omit the recapitulatory chapter which commences M. de Molinari’s additional matter, and to indicate in footnotes the sources, rather than to quote at length the long catena of authorities published in the appendix to the French edition”). Both translations also mysteriously feature introductions (and in the case of Religion, intrusive footnotes) by authors fundamentally out of sympathy with Molinari’s viewpoint, who mostly take the opportunity to ride their own hobby horses. Still, these translations are far better than nothing.

The Society of Tomorrow has been available online for a while. I’m pleased to see that the English version of Religion is now available as well, via Google Books.

Religion represents an interpretation of the history of religion from the point of view of libertarian economics and evolutionary social theory; the chief political moral that Molinari draws from his analysis is that attempts either to impose or to suppress religion by force of law are harmful to society (as are all interferences with free competition), and he accordingly calls for a complete exclusion of the state from matters involving religion.

Molinari is coy as to whether he himself accepts any religious belief. He defends religion to the extent of arguing, first, that its central claims (which he takes to be the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) are not contrary to science, and second, that religion is beneficial for society (this latter on the grounds that a belief in divine reward and punishment is necessary for ordinary people, though perhaps not for the wise few, to feel sufficient motivation to behave rightly). Yet his explanations of the historical development of religion and the triumph of one faith over another are purely economic and never make any reference to the truth or falsity of religious claims. (For example, he maintains that Christianity displaced paganism because it was cheaper.) Hence both believers and unbelievers will probably find themselves occasionally annoyed while reading it; still, it’s a fascinating book, whatever one may think of the details.

Reviews Resurrected

Roderick — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:02:42 +0000

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The Mises Institute has posted a PDF of a 1945 issue of American Affairs featuring articles by, inter alia, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Garet Garrett, and Isabel Paterson. I’ve posted an HTML version of the Paterson piece, a book review, on the Molinari Institute site (not because it’s an especially interesting piece, but because hey, it’s Paterson). I’ve also posted a 1900 review of a book about French semi-anarchist Charles Dunoyer. (Check out the delightful put-down in the last paragraph.)