Doug Rasmussen has a piece on Ayn Rand up today on Cato Unbound as part of their online symposium on Rand. Over the next few days, Neera Badhwar, Mike Huemer, and I will be posting responses.
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Haiti’s Stateless Utopia
On the news everyone keeps saying the problem with Haiti’s economy – and thus with its post-earthquake recovery – is that Haiti doesn’t have enough of a government.
Really? On this see Tom Knapp and Maggie Koerth-Baker.
Zoo Story
Rebecca West on John Maynard Keynes:
He closely resembled a handsome, elderly seal, in the long fluence of his outline, the sinuosity of his strength, the roundness of his brow, and the projection of his gray moustache. Had his destiny placed him on a rocky eminence in a zoo, he would have caught the fish that an entranced public would certainly have thrown him in unprecedented amounts, with a dexterity all his own. (“From England,” Harper’s, June 1946.)
Now Wreaking Slightly Less Evil For a Limited Period
In the wake of the earthquake, a number of countries – including the u.s., France, and the Dominican Republic – are calling a temporary halt to the deportation of Haitian immigrants.
While this falls far short of the freeing-up of the borders that justice and compassion alike demand, it represents a little bit of very welcome decency.
Liberty 5-3000, Meet Pennsylvania 6-5000
Has anyone noticed before that the names in Anthem are all in the format of old-style telephone exchanges?
Also, Directive 10-289 from Atlas can be converted to the same format just by shifting the hyphen.
Now all we need is a song titled “Union 7-5309.”
Float Time
A lot of Randians seem to think that the phrase and concept “floating abstraction” is specific to Rand; but in fact the term “floating abstraction” (or, more commonly, “free-floating abstraction”), often (though not always) meaning something actually fairly close to what Rand meant by it, is quite common in Continental and leftist thought, showing up in Marxist, feminist, phenomenological, and postmodernist discourse.
I don’t know whether this is a coincidence or whether there was influence – or, if so, in which direction. It would be interesting to know which came first, but I’m not sure how old either version is. The oldest use I could find online for “free-floating abstraction” was from Kathleen Nott in 1969 (but I didn’t search at much length); Rand was already using “floating abstraction” at least as early as 1961 (in For the New Intellectual) and probably earlier. (It’s also in Branden’s Principles lectures (as transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand), the earliest version of which was recorded in 1958, but I don’t know which year the text in Vision comes from; and Atlas Shrugged seems to be working toward the concept in Galt’s reference to “the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream.”)