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The Spooner the Better

By on December 26, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Reminder: the Molinari Society will be holding its fourth annual Symposium this week in Baltimore, in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (Dec. 27-30). Here’s the schedule, with links to the papers (which, as you’ll see, are both Spooner-intensive):

Lysander Spooner GVIII-4. Saturday, 29 December 2007, 11:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: “Anarchy: It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law”
Falkland (Fourth Floor), Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, 700 Aliceanna Street

Session 1, 11:15-12:15:
chair: Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
speaker: Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
title: “A Place for Positive Law: A Contribution to Anarchist Legal Theory”
commentator: John Hasnas (Georgetown University)

Session 2, 12:15-1:15:
chair: Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College)
speaker: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
title: “Inside and Outside Spooner’s Natural Law Jurisprudence”
commentator: Geoffrey Allan Plauché (Louisiana State University)

Also check out the schedules (happily not conflicting) of the AAPSS and ARS. 

So if you plan to be in the Baltimore area, come on by! (Last year they switched us to a different room at the last minute, so if you come to the appointed location and don’t see us, look around for a sign – we’ll be sure to have one up if it’s needed.)

Three Anarchistic Tales

By on December 26, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

For he, like a man or a star, lives in a universe
shut in by walls of the things he knows. – RWL

A late Christmas gift for you: three hauntingly beautiful and politically subversive early 20th-century tales – all searing indictments of the brutality of the state – have been posted in the Molinari Online Library: Voltairine de Cleyre’s fiction-disguised-as-memoir “The Chain Gang” (1907), Gertrude Nafe’s mordant fable “The Law and the Man Who Laughed” (1913), and Rose Wilder Lane’s journalism-disguised-as-fiction “A Bit of Gray in a Blue Sky” (1919). (This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the Nafe and Lane pieces have been available online.)

chain gang De Cleyre and Lane were of course leading writers of the libertarian anarchist tradition (representing that tradition’s “socialist” and “capitalist” strands respectively, if it matters). I haven’t been able to learn much about Gertrude Nafe, except that she was an associate of Emma Goldman’s, that she was active in John Reed’s Communist Labor Party, that her short stories were well-regarded by the mainstream, and that she was dismissed from her post as a Denver schoolteacher for refusing to take an oath to “promote by precept and example obedience to laws and constituted authorities.” Specifically, I don’t know whether she was an anarchist; but “The Law and the Man Who Laughed” is certainly anarchist in spirit.

Despite its obvious antiracist intent, “The Chain Gang” is marred by some unconscious racism (beneath all her beautiful metaphors, de Cleyre is in effect characterising blacks – or black convicts, anyway – as congenitally ignorant but naturally musical, comparing them to idiots savants), but its haunting beauty survives this flaw.

“A Bit of Gray in a Blue Sky” isn’t explicitly an antiwar story, but it’s hard not to read it as one, or to see an analogy between the fate of Lane’s carrier pigeon and the fate of human beings dragged from their ordinary lives into the jaws of a war machine they know and care nothing about. (Incidentally, see the true story behind Lane’s account. Sadly, by the time “A Bit of Gray” was published, the pigeon had already died of its wounds.)

Christmas Greetings

By on December 25, 2007 0

Merry Christmas / Kwanzaa / Dies Natalis Solis Invicti to everyone out there in the Empire!

Ebenezer Scrooge In honour of the season, I link to this old editorial of mine on the libertarian case against Ebenezer Scrooge.

Finally, in the words of John Lennon, channeling Étienne de la Boétie: “Happy Christmas – war is over – if you want it.”

When Platform Shoes Pinch

By on December 24, 2007 5

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I didn’t catch Tim Russert’s interview with Ron Paul, but check out the transcript. (Caveat: I don’t know how accurate the transcript is as a whole, but I’m willing to bet that Paul didn’t actually say “Randolph Bourne says war is a helpless state.” And what is “the Robert/Taft wing of the party”? Who’d they get to do the transcript, Dana Perino?)

anarchist rEVOLution I think Paul did a pretty good job on the whole, but the transcript does illustrate the perils of a libertarian electoral strategy. If you run as a consistent libertarian, you’ll scare off voters as they now are; if, instead, you water down or soft-pedal some aspects of your philosophy, you’ll get called on the inconsistency – as happens here, where Paul ends up sounding like he’s defending the FBI, the CIA, public schools, and the legitimacy of invading North Korea as long as Congress declares war first.

I don’t think this dilemma is a decisive argument against going the electoral route, but it certainly counts in the minus column.

Pyramid Scheme

By on December 20, 2007 4

Caral, Peruvian city of pyramids – older than Egypt’s pyramids, older than India’s Harappa, and “born in trade and not bloodshed,” its discoverer maintains. (Conical hat tip to LRC.) And see this article for similar claims about Harappa. I’m not qualified to evaluate these claims, but they’re interesting. 

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