Kevin Carson’s latest C4SS study, The Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization, is now online. As the subtitle suggests, the study documents the tendency of so-called “progressives” to side with power and privilege against genuine left radicalism.
In other C4SS news (not so new at this point), check out the first installment of Gary Chartier’s introductory course on anarchism for Stateless U.:
Watch some more here.
Two very good things have happened:
David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, one of the most influential free-market anarchist works of the last 100 years, is now available online (in PDF format).
Kevin Carson’s latest book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, is now in print.
The next time someone tells you that the BP oil spill shows the dangers of a free market and/or the necessity of government intervention, send them to:
Please let me know in the comments section about other good commentaries I may have missed!
On a related note, this sign from an actual BP station is priceless. (The pic below is just a detail; click to see the whole thing.)
The entry on Ayn Rand that Neera Badhwar and I co-authored for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now online.
While we each wrote a bit of everything, Neera was the principal author for the sections on ethics and social-political philosophy, as well as for the biographical section, while I was the principal author for the sections on metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics.
Looking the piece over I see that we devoted something like 35 paragraphs to metaphysics and epistemology, 34 paragraphs to ethics, and only 11 to social-political. That seems about right to me, but will probably surprise many readers who are accustomed to thinking of Rand as primarily a political thinker.
Shawn Wilbur has some interesting remarks on the benefits and hazards of the possession/property distinction.
In related news, Demonic Possession would be a great name for an anti-Proudhonian screed.
Descartes’s philosophical anthropology is widely thought to mark a radical break from the preceding Aristotelean tradition. But Paul Hoffman has been arguing for the past quarter-century that, despite various differences, Descartes is actually far closer to the Aristotelean conception of the embodied human being as a hylomorphic unity than to the popular textbook “Cartesian” stereotype of two separate substances interacting.
Of course Descartes differs from Aristotle over the separability of soul and body – but so did Aquinas. Hoffman’s point is that for Descartes, as for Aquinas, separability does not imply separation; so long as soul and body are united, they make up a single substance.
Hoffman identifies still further Aristotelean legacies in Descartes’s thought, such as the identity of action and passion, and the existence of the cognised in the cogniser.
Hoffman was my professor back in the 80s, and he largely convinced me of his interpretation. The passages that Hoffman relies on to make his case are not exactly unknown, but they are often dismissed (even by non-Straussians) as merely attempts on Descartes’s part to cover his ass and appear more orthodox than he really was in order to avoid persecution. Consequently, such passages have not received as much careful analysis as they deserve; but once one does analyse them, as Hoffman does, the ass-covering interpretation becomes very difficult to take seriously.
I’m happy to see that a collection of Hoffman’s Descartes essays is now finally in print.
The bad news is that it’s pricey. The good news is that many of the essays in it are online here and here. You can also read Hoffman’s own summary of his interpretation.