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Of Making Many Books There Is No End

By on December 19, 2014 1

I’ve just created two Patreon pages.

One is a per-month pledge page for several libertarian book projects I’m working on; these include:

marsgate

  • Austro-Athenian Foundations of Libertarian Ethics, the transcribed record of my 2006 philosophy seminar at the Mises Institute;
  • selections of material from my Free Nation Foundation / Libertarian Nation Foundation days;
  • collections of more recent online writings, from my blog and elsewhere;
  • a collection of translations of works on libertarian class theory by Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Augustin Thierry, and Gustave de Molinari;
  • Frodo Shrugged, a book comparing and contrasting Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged;
  • a new interdisciplinary libertarian academic journal, the Molinari Review.

Details here.

The other is a per-post pledge page for my four science-fiction/fantasy blogs: on Star Trek, The Avengers (the UK one, not the Marvel one), Danger Man/The Prisoner, and the Oz books. These posts will also be collected as books. Details here.

Pledgers will have opportunities to get advance content, free signed books, and the chance to influence the order in which I tackle the various projects.

You can pledge as little as a dollar per month (for the books page) and/or a dollar per post (for the blogs page). Any help is appreciated; I have a lot of cool stuff I want to accomplish, but am in tight circumstances financially (and my home computer is on its last legs).

Spencer Unbound!

By on December 11, 2014 0

I recently participated in a “Liberty Matters” online discussion on Herbert Spencer, with George H. Smith, Alberto Mingardi, and David M. Levy, and edited by Sheldon Richman. Read it here.

If you missed last year’s “Liberty Matters” discussion of Gustave de Molinari, with me, Gary Chartier, Matt Zwolinski, David D. Friedman, and David M. Hart, check it out here.

Life in a Northern Town

By on September 29, 2014 2

On September 8-10 I was in Manchester for a MANCEPT Workshop on the current state of libertarian political philosophy. Organiser Andreas Wolkenstein put an interesting group together; one of the participants was left-libertarian Billy Christmas, who will also be on the Molinari Society’s panel on privilege in December.

My own MANCEPT talk was essentially an historical introduction to left-libertarianism; I’ve posted the abstract previously, and I now post my powerpoint presentation as well.

In honour of Manchester’s industrial heritage (and also because it was cheap), I stayed at a former warehouse converted into a hotel. (It’s industrial! It’s radical!) I also enjoyed dining on the Curry Mile, a section of Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurants; Mughli was especially good.

William Morris woodcut

Touristic informations – Mancunian edition:

To catch a bus, it is not sufficient to stand by the correct bus stop with an expression of expectation. The bus will whiz right by you. You need to flag it down like a taxi.

Also the price for the same ride will be different every day.

In London, vendors are familiar with American credit cards; but they’re a puzzle for vendors in Manchester. They look for the chip instead of the strip.

The Lebanese version of baklava has halvah in it.

After the conference I squeezed in a couple of days in London: caught a beer at the Harp with Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood; visited the William Morris Museum; visited the graves of Herbert Spencer and Douglas Adams at Highgate Cemetery; walked around on Hampstead Heath; and visited Forbidden Planet and the National Gallery.

Faisons à Nouveau la Distorsion Temporelle

By on June 22, 2014 1

Timothy Messer-Kruse’s The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876 is an interesting book, documenting the history of the freewheeling American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association before the Marxists kicked the feminist, anarchists, and antiracists out. (Stephen Pearl Andrews, Victoria Woodhull, Ezra Heywood, William Greene, J. K. Ingalls, and by some reports Lysander Spooner were members.)

But this passage about the Paris Commune gave me pause:

“Sadly, the Commune was short-lived, and soon a vicious counterrevolution on the part of Napoleon III, aided by Prussian troops, had turned the tide.” (p. 100)

Um. The Commune lasted from March through May of 1871. Napoléon III had been taken prisoner (not a straightforward sense of “aided”) by Prussian troops at the Battle of Sedan in September of the previous year. Upon his release in March 1871 (consequent to the resolution of peace negotiations ending the Franco-Prussian War), he went into exile in England and spent the rest of his life there. Thus he had no role in the French government from September 1870 on. There was indeed a “vicious counterrevolution” in response to the Commune, and I’m sure that, had Napoléon III been in power, he would have happily led it. But he wasn’t and didn’t.

So now I worry, if the book is wrong about so basic a fact of history, what else is it wrong about?

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