Austro-Athenian Empire » Online Texts

Scholastic Achievement Test

Roderick — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:21:47 +0000

More juvenilia: Whether What Is Transcendent Is Dependent (unsuccessful parody of medieval philosophy, age 19). Adam Smith says somewhere that a sculpture of an animal is more impressive than a sculpture of a chair, because a sculpture of a chair isn’t sufficiently different from an actual chair; a similar criticism applies here.

Armed With Ajax!

Roderick — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:01:20 +0000

More juvenilia: an essay on Sophocles’ Ajax, from senior year of college.

The Butler Did It

Roderick — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:45:38 +0000

Josiah Warren is often called the father of American individualist anarchism. (I’m in the midst of reading Crispin Sartwell’s excellent Warren collection.) Most of Warren’s major works are relatively easy to find online; an exception is his unpublished Notebook D, edited by Ann Butler for her undergraduate thesis in 1964. This too turns out to be online, but its being so is a bit tricky to detect: my information had led me to look for Butler’s 1968 M.A. thesis, which has the same title and is evidently not online; how it differs from the 1964 version I know not. (Butler wrote her 1978 Ph.D. thesis on Warren as well, though thankfully with a different title; this too is not online.)

Notebook D is probably not the ideal place to start with Warren; Equitable Commerce and True Civilization are better entry points. But Notebook D remains important and valuable; among its most interesting features is Warren’s account of his views on marriage and the family, and in particular his narrative of the way in which he applied his anarchistic principles to the education of his children. Read Part 1, from 1840, and Part 2, from 1860 and 1873.

Spiked

Roderick — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:34:33 +0000

More juvenilia: some unfinished stories from the 1970s.

Table For Six

Roderick — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:26:38 +0000

More juvenilia: some unfinished stories from the 1980s.

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread, Part 2

Roderick — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:17:44 +0000

As previously mentioned, the Society of Political Economy met in 1849 to critique Molinari’s market anarchist ideas. A month later, one of the participants in that discussion, free-banking theorist Charles Coquelin, developed his objections further in a book review of Molinari’s Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare for the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted Coquelin’s review also.

These two pieces are especially important as the first critiques ever published (AFAIK) of the idea that the legitimate functions of government could and should be turned over to market mechanisms.

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread

Roderick — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:13:09 +0000

In 1849, the members of the Society of Political Economy – the chief organisation for classical liberalism in France at the time – met to discuss Molinari’s proposal for the competitive provision of security. The meeting included some of the foremost liberal thinkers of the day, such as Bastiat, Dunoyer, Coquelin, Wolowski, and Horace Say (son of J.-B.). Without exception they agreed that Molinari’s ideas were unworkable, offering much the same objections to market anarchism as those that are prevalent today. (Although, oddly, nobody raised the objection that would later lead Molinari himself to moderate his position, namely the problem of so-called “public goods.”) Even Dunoyer, who in his earlier work had come close to Molinari’s position, now held that it was best to leave coercive force “where civilisation has placed it – in the State.”

As Rothbard notes, this is an odd claim coming from “one of the great founders of the conquest theory of the State.” Dunoyer’s suggestion that democratic elections provide all the competition that’s needed in the market for security also sits oddly with his earlier interest-group analysis of electoral politics.

A summary of this meeting was published in a subsequent issue of the Society’s organ, the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted this summary, which bears the title “Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action  Discussed at the Society of Political Economy.”

Pineapples From Space

Roderick — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:27:40 +0000

More juvenilia: The Elemen Transaction and Ill-Starred Romance (two odd little things, not stories exactly – both age 12).

We Daren’t Go A-Hunting For Fear of Little Men

Roderick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 07:11:08 +0000

More juvenilia: How Two Hunters Were Discouraged By an Apparition (short story, age 12).

By Heaven, I’ll Know Thy Thoughts

Roderick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 07:00:20 +0000

I realise to my surprise that I never got around to posting my APS paper “Shakespeare, Godwin, Kafka, and the Political Problem of Other Minds.” Okay, now I have.

Here’s the abstract:

Colin McGinn maintains that Othello is about the problem of other minds. But Othello’s version of the problem – the inaccessibility of particular others in particular respects, not of other minds per se – might seem to lack the generality needed to count as philosophical. Drawing on examples from Othello, Caleb Williams, and Amerika, I argue that Othello’s problem, while distinct from the traditional problem of other minds, is indeed a genuine philosophical problem, but one produced and sustained by alterable features of human society (specifically, race, gender, and class distinctions) rather than by unalterable features of cognition as such.

And speaking of Shakespeare, check out this neglected masterpiece.