Tonight’s “Mystery Guest” at Mises U. was Andrew Napolitano.
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Anarchy in America
As William Gillis points out, two important histories of individualist anarchism in the u.s. are now online: Eunice Schuster’s (confusingly titled) Native American Anarchism (1932) and Rudolf Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom (1949). These join James Martin’s (sexistly titled) Men Against the State (1953) and William Reichert’s Partisans of Freedom (1976), already online, making a nice quartet.
In related news, Mises.org just put up an article on Sam Konkin by Jeff Riggenbach.
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Direct Action, Good and Bad
Asset: Feminists strike back in India
Liability: Leonard Peikoff embraces private terrorism against American Muslims
Hunt the Wild Justice
C. S. Lewis’s article “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” is simultaneously an excellent argument against the rehabilitative or therapeutic approach to punishment, and a lousy argument in favour of the retributive approach to punishment. Lewis makes a compelling and eloquent proto-Szaszian case for the thesis that punishment not based on responsibility is wrong; but, never examining his implicit premise that punishment must be justified somehow or other, he then slides without much reflection into the conclusion that punishment based on responsibility must be right. So when I read this article I’m cheering half the time and tearing my hair out the other half.
Of course that’s often my reaction when reading Lewis – as when reading Nietzsche, another writer who to my mind tends to mix together equal parts of the magnificently right and the horribly wrong (though his points of rightness and wrongness seldom coincide with Lewis’s). Anyway, Lewis, like Nietzsche, is generally worth reading even when he’s wrong.
While we’re at it, here’s another fine Lewis piece, “The Inner Ring,” that has a good deal less wrong in it.
Nader-Napolitano Lovefest
Check out this (mostly) excellent conversation between Ralph Nader and Andrew Napolitano.