I’m pleased to report that this list of the top 100 liberal arts professor blogs (selected by what criteria or procedure I don’t know) includes four libertarian ones: Chris Sciabarra’s, Jacob Levy’s, Liberty & Power, and your humble Empire.
Author Archive | Roderick
Now Bigger and With More Angry Workers!
I’ve always meant to buy myself a copy of the 1927 film Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic tale of class struggle and sexy robots, but I never got around to it (though I’ve seen it on tv a couple of times). Now I’m glad I waited.
Two Reviews
1. The July/August 2008 issue of the New Individualist features a review by Will Thomas (“Atlas, Seen Through Many Eyes,” pp. 52-55) of Ed Younkins’ anthology Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. 
Here’s what he says about my contribution (which he kindly includes among the “best essays” that “accurately represent Rand’s distinctive worldview while bringing something new to the table”):
In “Forced to Rule,” philosopher Roderick Long looks at how Atlas Shrugged may have been in part a response to Plato’s dialogue the Republic. The Republic portrays a collectivist utopia where material life and education are sharply controlled by the government. All must act from duty, not self-interest – even the rulers, who should be wise men forced to rule against their inclinations. Long points out that this is strange, since Plato’s appear to focus on individual flourishing. How can there be individual happiness without any freedom? But Plato was a dualist, holding that real knowledge, truth, and virtue proceed from a realm of Ideas only dimly reflected in material reality, and this made him pessimistic about practical affairs. Long shows how Rand strikes back at this conception of man in Atlas Shrugged and details implicit references to Plato in the text. Rand reject the dichotomy of mind versus body and its attendant splits of spirit versus matter, love versus sex, and art versus engineering. In the climax of Atlas, Rand puts Plato’s doctrine to the test as the villains try to torture John Galt – the best and wisest of men, “an engineer and philosopher” – to make him rule them. (Spoiler: It doesn’t work.)
2. Joel Parthemore has an online review of my colleague Kelly Jolley’s excellent book The Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations. While the book’s topic may appear narrow and arcane, “its target,” as Parthemore notes “is nothing less than the nature of structured thought itself.”
Property, Commerce, Capitalism
Proudhon is a bit like Hegel (by whom he was indirectly influenced) in that he attempts to synthesise and reconcile a myriad of apparently opposing viewpoints, and so it’s risky to rely on any single formulation taken out of context as a reliable indicator of his views, when it may be only a provisional approximation, or one side of a dialectical opposition. Shawn Wilbur has a useful post today about Proudhon’s use of the term, and concept, property.
Another post from Shawn refers to a recent interesting article in French. Here’s a quick translation:
A Commerce Without Capitalism
And if commerce and exchange were inseparable from the creation of real spaces of resistance? So many niches of experimentation of a future society – a better one, of course – may be found in the four corners of the world: from the Cartoneros [cardboard recyclers] of Argentina inventing their own economy, to the Diggers of San Francisco trying out freedom-from-payment, passing to the trabendo of the Marseilles quarters that mocks sealed borders [anybody know what this refers to?], without forgetting the utopian anarchists of the 19th century who took the first steps toward workers’ cooperatives. Everywhere there is exchange, there is barter, there is giving and recompensing, there is sharing: in short, there is collective resistance to a capitalist society that seeks to reduce commerce to a mere accumulation of capital with money as the sole intermediary.
The rejection of commerce by the extreme left, generally speaking, is indicative of this confusion between capitalism and commerce. It is true that in a country where six central purchasing centers handle the exchanges among 60 million consumers and 400,000 farmers, it is difficult to think otherwise! And Wal-Mart, the U.S.-based multinational distributor, is now the largest enterprise in the world, ahead of the oil companies.
Yet for all that, one cannot abandon commerce solely to the traffickers in profits. As Michel Besson of the Minga association likes to remind us, “there have always been men and women who desired to exchange with one another in a respectful and peaceful manner, simply because it is much more agreeable for everybody to live without competing with one another, without exploiting one another, without swindling one another. Equity in exchanges forms a part of the culture of many societies around the world.” And it is for this reason that today, over and above the concept-marketing of equitable commerce, there exists around the world a profusion of commercial alternatives, each more amazing than the next, each with its limits since it must come to terms with capitalist society, they offer another way of living together. Sometimes these alternatives escape the supervision of centralist States, which, anxious that nothing should subsist outside their sphere of control, consequently stigmatise such exchanges as “black-market,” “informal,” clandestine – which do not even count in the GDP! Nonetheless, and extremely happily, such experiments remind us that prior to the exchange of merchandise there is also a human exchange, a mode of relation among persons. An exchange that may give birth to emancipation.
You Need Some Blood On That Résumé
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
So the pundits (including people who are usually smarter) are howling because Wesley Clark made what ought to be a patently obvious and uncontroversial observation: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” This, apparently, amounts to “belittling” McCain’s war record.
Huh? Even for those who regard McCain’s war record as a valuable achievement, how is it “belittling” one achievement to point out that it’s not a relevant qualification for another achievement? Would you agree to be operated on by someone whose sole qualification is that he can speak fourteen languages? Or would you accept as a translator, for your visit to the headhunters of the Amazon, someone who could boast only surgical proficiency? And if not, are you “belittling” linguistic competency (or, in the second case, medical skill)?
Thomas Jefferson once silenced a proponent of hereditary monarchy by suggesting that the professorship of mathematics might also be made hereditary. Ah, why not make military service the basis for the professorship of mathematics too? How does combat experience qualify anyone to be president (assuming counterfactually that someone could be qualified to be president)? Does McCain run the risk of being kidnapped and tortured by Nancy Pelosi? Or will he need to bomb the Supreme Court?
So anyway, tonight Clark goes on Dan Abrams’ show and falls all over himself to assure us that nobody denies that McCain is a war hero. Well, I deny it. McCain was a serial killer in what by his own virtual admission was an unjust war. Heroism this is not.
Marriage Catch-22
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
A friend sends me a link to this story about several counties in California responding to the recent legalisation of same-sex marriage by refusing to perform any marriage ceremonies at all, whether same-sex or hetero. My friend asks whether this is a positive or negative development from a libertarian standpoint; although the motive may be homophobic, isn’t this policy a step in the right direction, i.e., toward getting the state out of the business of defining and regulating marriage, leaving it to private contract and custom?
Well, I think it’s a mixed bag. Recent events have actually gotten the separation of state and marriage onto the table in broader-than-libertarian circles, which is surely a good thing even if some of the motives are questionable. But under present circumstances, county governments refusing to perform marriages has a serious downside.
As things stand, the state imposes a variety of legal burdens on unmarried couples from which married couples are exempt; these range from higher taxes to restrictions on inheritance, refusal of right to make medical decisions on a partner’s behalf, and, in the case of citizen/alien couples, liability to deportation for the alien. In this context, when one branch of the state, charged with providing the only legal means of avoiding certain forms of aggression imposed by another branch of the state, refuses to provide those means, it arguably becomes an accessory to the aggression – while still collecting salary from the taxes of the victims, to boot. Now if county employees wish to resign their tax-funded jobs, that’s another matter. But in the meantime, it’s as though my henchman Sluggo says he’s going to rob you unless my other henchman Thuggo says not to, while Thuggo remains silent (and collects his share of the take).
Incidentally, another friend who’s doing academic research on marriage asks me for citations to articles (preferably though not necessarily in academic journals) by “prominent libertarians” who argue that the state should stay out of marriage. Any suggestions? (So far all my friend has found is Jennifer Roback Morse’s argument that a libertarian state should not permit divorce! For the honour of libertarianism we must do better.)