[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Today (well, strictly speaking, yesterday, as of five minutes ago) is the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the sixth anniversary of both the Molinari Institute and my blog.
In related news, my third AOTP post is up: The Real Meaning of 9/11.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
The Molinari Society will be holding its fifth annual Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2008. Here’s the latest schedule info:
GIX-3. Monday, 29 December 2008, 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: Authors Meet Critics:
Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory and
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street, Room TBA
Chair: Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College)
Critics:
Nicole Hassoun (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Christopher Morris (University of Maryland)Authors:
John Hasnas (Georgetown University)
Lester H. Hunt (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
Jan Narveson (University of Waterloo-Canada)
Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College)
William Thomas (Atlas Society)
As part of the APA’s new policy to prevent free riders, they’re not telling us the name of the room until we get to the registration desk. As part of our policy of combating evil we will of course broadcast the name of the room far and wide as soon as we learn it.
Happily, we have once again avoided any schedule conflicts with either the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society (Dec. 28th, 11:15 -1:15) or the Ayn Rand Society (Dec. 28th, 2:00-5:00).
In other news, the schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society meeting in Orange Beach is now online.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve just posted an 1842 work by English individualist anarchist Thomas Hodgskin titled Peace, Law, and Order; Hodgskin objects to the common conjoining of these three terms, on the grounds that law is the greatest threat to peace and order, not their guarantor.
I’ve also finished posting American mutualist Dyer Lum’s 1890 Economics of Anarchy, along with a shorter work by Lum from 1887 titled On Anarchy. These works deal with many of the same issues as Tandy’s book, though Lum is a bigger fan of cooperative association than Tandy and is not quite as firmly committed to nonviolent methods.
Elsewhere in the libersphere, Shawn Wilbur has also located and posted an 1890 anti-tariff piece by battlin’ Belgian Gustave de Molinari titled “The McKinley Bill in Europe.”
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve finally finished posting Francis Tandy’s 1896 individualist anarchist work Voluntary Socialism. Chapter 9 defends the occupancy-and-use theory of land ownership, and criticises the Georgist alternative. Chapter 10 is a critique of intellectual property. Chapter 11 criticises the assumption that workers’ cooperatives would dominate the post-capitalist economy. Chapter 12 takes on the postal monopoly. Chapter 13 defends education over electoral politics and violent revolution as a method of advancing anarchism. Chapter 12 – the most depressing for a present-day anarchist – points to signs that the cultural power of statism is waning (in 1896). Finally, an appendix offers suggestions for future reading.
I’ve also posted a contemporary review by one K. C. Felton (who seems not to have read Tandy’s book very carefully).
Coming soon: more Dyer Lum!
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Gustave de Molinari, pioneer of market anarchism, gets a couple of mentions in The Economist; see the Molinari Institute news page for details.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
In 1849, France’s leading spokesman for libertarian “capitalism” (Frédéric Bastiat) and France’s leading spokesman for libertarian “socialism” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) exchanged a series of public letters debating the nature and legitimacy of charging interest on loans.
In 1879, American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker translated most of the letters, which were then published serially in the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator – whereupon, apart from a few excerpts, they vanished henceforth from human sight.
I’ve managed to track down a copy of the Irish World in microform and transcribe Tucker’s translation. Where the microform was too dark to read (it was really a lousy copy) I made educated guesses based on the French original, marking my conjectures in brackets. I’ve also translated two additional letters not included in Tucker’s translation, and thrown in an anonymous public-domain translation of Bastiat’s earlier criticism of Proudhon (which was what sparked off the debate to begin with). As of today, the whole thing is now, finally, online as The Bastiat-Proudhon Debate on Interest.
Most of this debate has not been widely available in English since 1879; and parts of it (including Bastiat’s final reply to Proudhon) have never been translated into English until now.
So who wins? Well, in my view, neither one – the two thinkers persistently talk past each other. I’ve posted a fuller analysis here; I’ll also be presenting this material at the Austrian Scholars Conference later this week.
