Students for Liberty has opened voting on the position of Student of the Year. I’m voting for our amazing SFL Senior Campus Coordinator and C4SS Fellow Cory Massimino, and recommend that everyone else do likewise. You can vote once a day until February 12th. Vote here.
[cross-posted at BHL]
Libertarian philosopher Billy Christmas writes to inform me of the following call for papers:
Brave New World 2016: Call for Papers
We invite submissions for Brave New World 2016, the twentieth annual postgraduate conference organised by the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT). The conference will take place on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st of June 2016 at the University of Manchester.
We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers this year will be:
The Brave New World conference series is a leading international forum dedicated to the discussion of postgraduate research in political theory. Participants will have the chance to meet and talk about their work with eminent academics, including members of faculty from the University of Manchester, as well as the guest speakers who will deliver plenary addresses.
Guest speakers in previous years have included: David Archard, Richard Arneson, Brian Barry, Simon Caney, G.A. Cohen, Roger Crisp, Cecile Fabre, Jerry Gaus, Bob Goodin, Peter Jones, Chandran Kukathas, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Jeff McMahan, Susan Mendus, David Miller, Onora O’Neill, Serena Olsaretti, Michael Otsuka, Bhikhu Parekh, Carole Pateman, Anne Phillips, Thomas Pogge, Joseph Raz, Andrea Sangiovanni, Samuel Scheffler, Quentin Skinner, Hillel Steiner, Adam Swift, Philippe Van Parijs, Leif Wenar, Andrew Williams, and Jonathan Wolff.
Submission guidelines
The deadline for submissions is 22nd April 2016. If you would like to present a paper, please send an abstract of approximately 400 words in MS Word format and prepared for blind review to brave.new.world@manchester.ac.uk. Please also state your name and institutional affiliation in the email. Papers focusing on any area of political theory or political philosophy are welcome.
Notices of acceptance will be sent by 6th May 2016.
We offer a number of bursaries for presenters to cover accommodation and travel expenses. These will be allocated according to need. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please say so when submitting your abstract and state where you will be travelling from and any other sources of funding you have available to cover costs. For further details please contact us at brave.new.world@manchester.ac.uk.
The C4SS prison abolition panel, originally scheduled for last year’s APEE but sadly cancelled, is being revived for this year. The panelists will be Dan D’Amico, Gary Chartier, Jason Byas, Nathan Goodman, and myself. Jason and Nathan need some financial assistance getting to the conference; if you’d like to help, please check out our GoFundMe page.
[cross-posted at C4SS]
Amazon Loves Anarchy
The Molinari Institute (the parent organization of the Center for a Stateless Society) has registered with Amazon.com for an Amazon Smile account. That means that if you sign up for Amazon’s Smile program and pick The Molinari Institute (EIN 20-3731375) as your preferred charity, from then on every time you make a purchase on Amazon (so long as you access Amazon through the Smile gateway), Amazon will donate – from their funds, not yours – 0.5% of the purchase price to us.
Thus for example if you make $100 worth of purchases from Amazon via Smile, we’ll get 50 cents – paid by Amazon, not by you.
Donations raised through the Smile program will then be split 50/50 between the Center for a Stateless Society and the Molinari Institute’s other projects (including our upcoming publishing line).
The Molinari Institute’s tax-exempt status is now officially listed on the IRS website. (It took a while because they only update the list once a month.)
The Molinari Institute is delighted to announce that it has been declared by the IRS to be a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation; hence donations to the Molinari Institute – and thus to the Institute’s media center, the Center for a Stateless Society – are tax-deductible.
To quote from the IRS’s determination letter, dated 2 April 2015:
We’re pleased to tell you we determined you’re exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 501(c)(3). Donors can deduct contributions they make to you under IRC section 170. You’re also qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers or gifts under Section 2055, 2106, or 2522. … We determined you’re a public charity under the IRC section [509(a)(2)].
The mission of the Molinari Institute is to promote understanding of the philosophy of market anarchism as a sane, consensual alternative to the hypertrophic violence of the State. The Molinari Institute hosts an online open-access library of rare libertarian classics, including new translations of 19th-century French works, and publishes two periodicals: a magazine, The Industrial Radical, and an academic journal, the Molinari Review. The Molinari Society, a daughter organisation, hosts annual symposia at the Eastern and Pacific Divisions of the American Philosophical Association.
The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), an autonomous extension of the Molinari Institute, develops and publishes timely written commentary on current events, research pieces and other content from a market anarchist perspective. Each week the Center submits several op-ed pieces to thousands of newspapers and other media outlets globally, and has received about 2500 mainstream media pickups since 2010. The Center’s student affiliate network, the Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), offers opportunities for campus outreach and activism.
Future projects for both the Institute and the Center include book publishing (both classic and original works), conferences, courses (online and otherwise), new translation projects, and media presentations.
Both the Institute and the Center are part of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, which opposes statism, militarism, cultural intolerance, and the prevailing corporatist capitalism falsely called a free market. The Alliance’s Distro, in partnership with the Institute and Center, produces and distributes zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation.
You can donate to support the work of the Molinari Institute here, and the work of the Center for a Stateless Society here.