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Anarchist Anthology Advenes Auspiciously

By on February 4, 2008 12

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

A nice birthday present came in the mail today: my anthology with Tibor, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, hot off the presses. It looks very nice. (Well, at 40¢ a page, it’d better!)

The book features contributions from a variety of philosophical perspectives within libertarianism, including consequentialist, deontological, contractarian, Randian, and Hayekian approaches.

The contents:

PART 1: MINARCHISM

1. Why the State Needs a Justification – Lester H. Hunt

2. Libertarianism, Limited Government and Anarchy – John Roger Lee

3. Rationality, History, and Inductive Politics – Adam ReedAnarchism/Minarchism

4. Objectivism against Anarchy – William R Thomas

5. Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism – Tibor R. Machan

PART 2: ANARCHISM

6. Radical Freedom and Social Living – Aeon James Skoble

7. The State: From Minarchy to Anarchy – Jan Narveson

8. The Obviousness of Anarchy – John Hasnas

9. Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism – Roderick T. Long

10. Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism – Charles Johnson

It strikes me that four of the ten contributors have some connection to the Auburn Philosophy Department. Tibor and I are Professor Emeritus and Associate Professor, respectively; Aeon was an Instructor here in 1993-1994; and Charles was an undergrad philosophy major here, graduating in 2003.

Ethics Quiz

By on January 29, 2008 9

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

If the difference between an innocent person’s going free and that innocent person’s serving a ten-year prison sentence depended on your say-so, and if you could set that person free with zero risk to yourself, what would you do?

Vigil Injustus Non Est Vigil

By on January 28, 2008 13

Socrates held that no one counts a genuine judge unless he judges justly. He also held, as did Augustine, Aquinas, and Spooner, that no law counts as a genuine law unless it too is just.

Barney and Andy A 75-year-old Florida grandmother has now found her way to the same idea. Asked why she didn’t “respect” a police officer’s demand that she move her car away from the spot where she had been told (by the owners of the parking space) to park it – a lack of respect that led to her being handcuffed and her car impounded – she explained: I guess I felt he wasn’t a police officer; he wasn’t there to help me, he was there to be mean to me.

The Radiance that Streams Immortally from the Door of the Law

By on January 28, 2008 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

$500 and change will buy you a copy of this massive treatise in which two of my articles on Greek philosophy of law appear.

DiogenesOr you can read them online for free here:

Socrates and Socratic Philosophers of Law

Hellenistic Philosophers of Law

Two caveats:

1. The first article is co-authored with R. F. Stalley, whose take on these matters is quite different from mine. He wrote essentially all the material on Socrates (with the exception of the paragraph beginning “A somewhat different solution,” which is mine) while I wrote essentially all the material on Xenophon, the Cynics, and the Cyrenaics. He’s not responsible for what I say about the Socratics, and I’m not responsible for what he says about Socrates.

2. I did not (to the best of my possibly imperfect recollection) sign any copyright agreement forbidding me to post these articles, so I’ll assume I’m free to do so unless I hear otherwise. But it’s always possible that the publisher will make me take them down; so read them now while you can.

The Empire Rises Again

By on January 28, 2008 0

You may have noticed an error message when trying to reach my blog these past several days. Yahoo assured me that they were trying to fix the problem. It seems they have – for the moment, knock on wood, and all that.

I was unable to cross-post here my recent L&P post Strangers on a Train, but here it is now:

Charles Johnson had a good post the other day questioning the extent to which anarchists and minarchists are really “on the same train”; he has an even better follow-up now. I note especially his comparison of the track records of electoral versus counter-economic means in combating immigration controls.

(I would link to his post from my own blog as well, but it’s not there right now, and hasn’t been for a couple of days. Yahoo tells me they’re “investigating the problem.”)

Check out also a discussion of the meaning of “war criminal” in the comments section of another L&P post.

Rights, Racism, and Responsibility

By on January 23, 2008 3

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Several people have asked for copies of my working papers “Why Libertarians Believe There Is Only One Right,” “The Racist Syndrome: Sartre, Rand, and the Will to Concreteness,” and “Stakeholder Theory for Libertarians: A Rothbardian Defense of Corporate Social Responsibility,” so I’ve decided to post them online.

Ayn Rand and Jean-Paul Sartre These drafts were written a few years back (I actually started the stakeholder one in 1997 – prompted by my first reading of Friedman on this topic in preparation for teaching my first business ethics class when I came to Auburn) and I suspect I’ll want to word things differently when I return to revising them, but in the meantime here they are.

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