The second installment of the C4SS Mutual Exchange on Spontaneous Order continues with my contribution, Invisible Hands and Incantations: The Mystification of State Power.
Summary: while spontaneous-order mechanisms are often invoked as a benign alternative to state power, there are reasons for thinking that state power itself depends for its maintenance on spontaneous-order mechanisms – mechanisms that function primarily to render the oppressive nature of the state invisible.
Saruman boots up his iBall
Last night, around 2 a.m., after frustration at trying to transcribe the sometimes illegible file I’d gotten off of Google Books, I submitted an interlibrary loan request to the Auburn University library via the AU website. (They still call it interlibrary “loan” even when what’s requested is a scan or photocopy rather than a physical copy.)
Some time this morning, someone in the AU library sent a request to someone at the University of Michigan, who then went into the UM library stacks, found the 19th-century French periodical I was interested in, scanned a clean legible copy of the article I needed, and sent it as a PDF to my library – and it was waiting for me in my email by 10:21 a.m.
Jesse Walker has a nice discussion of the Farrant/McPhail/Berger paper on Hayek and Pinochet.
Sometime BHL guest blogger Charles Johnson’s essay “Women and the Invisible Fist” is the first round in a Mutual Exchange on Spontaneous Order over at Center for a Stateless Society. Another essay by myself, followed by commentary on both essays from philosophers Nina Brewer-Davis, Reshef Agam-Segal, and David Gordon, will follow over the next couple of weeks.
One of Charles’ main themes is that the concept of spontaneous order (à la Hayek) is used ambiguously. Sometimes it means consensual rather than coercive order; sometimes it means polycentric or participatory rather than directive order; and sometimes it means emergent rather than consciously designed order.
What does that have to do with feminism, libertarianism, patriarchy, and rape culture? Find out.
Here’s a fun, brief speech from Less Antman at the LP convention.
Some favourite bits:
As someone who joined the Libertarian Party more than 32 years ago, when our party and platform already was committed to marriage equality, while the rest of the country, including Democrats, were still debating gay imprisonment, I can tell you the first 27 years were the hardest.
Antiwar is the health of the antistate movement.
[Obama] holds the record for the most children killed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
(I have my doubts about the last statistic, though; remember that Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all winners as well. Admittedly most of their killings were committed before rather than after winning the prize, but Kissinger still got a good score in afterward, though admittedly as an advisor rather than a direct commander.)
Upcoming films in the Avengers universe include Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (so yes, that plotline is happening), Ant-man, and Guardians of the Galaxy. I assume the latter will tie in with the mid-credits scene in The Avengers.