Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian

Polish Express

Krakow Today I finished up my lectures for Mises University. Tomorrow morning I head off to Poland for the IVR conference in Krakow to present a paper on Lysander Spooner – the same paper I plan to present at the Molinari Society meeting in December. Then, after Krakow, I head to Holland – Holland, Michigan, that is – for a Liberty Fund conference. So I’ll be incommunibloggo for a while.


Burr Blur

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’ve been interested in Aaron Burr revisionism for a while. Burr had the bad luck to make enemies of both Jefferson and Hamilton, thus earning the ire of historians across the political spectrum; but I’ve long suspected that Burr, like Jefferson and Hamilton, was a complicated mix of good and bad and not the plaster villain he’s been cast as. (Besides, a man who wears a locket of Mary Wollstonecraft can’t be all bad!)

Aaron Burr I just saw a C-Span talk by Nancy Isenberg on her Burr-revisionist book Fallen Founder. The book sounded interesting, and less blindly adulatory of Burr than, say, Roger Kennedy’s book. (Kennedy’s Burr, an uncompromising abolitionist hero trying to carve out a territorial enclave of racial and sexual equality, always seemed a bit too good to be true.)

Unfortunately, I was put off by the fact that Isenberg said several things that seemed to me historically dubious:

1. Isenberg said that Hamilton wrote ahead of time that he planned to fire into the air during his duel with Burr. No; he wrote ahead of time that he planned not to fire at all. (Or at least he said that he planned to “reserve and throw away” his shot. “Throw away” is ambiguous, I suppose, between firing into the air and not firing, but “reserve” seems to favour the latter.)

2. She said that James Monroe’s military interventionism was at odds with the anti-interventionism of his own Monroe Doctrine. No; the Monroe Doctrine was not anti-interventionist – quite the contrary.

3. She said that Hamilton was a slaveowner. Maybe; but although Hamilton was complicit in slavery in various ways, as far as I know his actually owning slaves hasn’t been proven. (He had black servants, but I don’t believe it’s ever been determined whether they were free or slave. Of course, I haven’t read her book; perhaps she proves this?)


More Tucker Online

Benjamin R. Tucker I’ve begun placing Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book online in HTML format. So far I’ve got the Preface, Part I, ten chapters from Part II, eleven chapters from Part III, three chapters from Part IV, and one chapter from Part VIII. More to follow!

But next up: the Bastiat-Proudhon debate!


You Can’t Get There From Here

If you’ve ever been to the Mises Institute in person, you know that there’s no entrance from the main street; you have to turn onto a narrow one-way side street and then turn in to the entrance. And then when you leave, you have to continue down that one-way street and then turn on to another narrow side street that finally exits on to an entirely different street.

This way to the Mises Institute! Now imagine what trying to get to the Mises Institute would be like if that one-way street were suddenly to become one-way in the other direction. If you were one of the thousands of people who visit the Institute every year, you’d be able to drive past the Institute, but there’d be no way to get in from the point where the Institute is actually visible. The only way to get to the Institute would be via a tiny side street on the other side of the block where nobody would ever think to look.

But don’t worry; only malice or blithering stupidity would lead city planners to do such a thing, right?


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