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You Can’t Spell RUWART Without WAR

By on April 16, 2008 3

Healing Our World - old and new editions Mary Ruwart’s candidacy is a great opportunity to promote her book Healing Our World. (Obviously her book can also be used to promote her candidacy, but for those of us whose chief strategic focus is social transformation in the long run rather than winning votes in the short run, the first way of putting it is more salient.) Buy the new edition, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (plus extra copies to inflict on your friends, especially your liberal/lefty friends), or read the earlier edition, Healing our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle, for free online (and send the link around). (By the way, although the new edition is a fair bit longer than the old one, it’s not quite as thick as the accompanying pic would imply.)

This is an especially good book to introduce to people who think that free-market policies benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. (Plus Ruwart manages to make radical positions seem friendly and unthreatening, unlike some libertarians spokesfolk who manage to make even fairly moderate positions sound alarming.)

Getcha Evil Here! Getcha War Here!

By on April 8, 2008 3

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Last Friday I presented a revised version of my talk “On Making Small Contributions to Evil” to the Auburn Philosophical Society.

Herbert Spencer and Gustave de Molinari This coming weekend I’ll be presenting a paper on “Herbert Spencer, Gustave de Molinari, and the Evanescence of War” at a panel on “The Libertarian Antiwar Tradition from the 1930s to the 1950s” at the Historians Against the War conference in Atlanta. Fellow panelist David Beito will be presenting ”Zora Neale Hurston, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson on Race, War, Individualism, and the State.”

Cavilers may object that Spencer and Molinari weren’t strictly 1930s-50s era guys. Well, Brian Doherty was going to present something topically relevant but had to back out, so I’m replacing him and had to throw something together at the last minute, and this is it.

Phantoms of Lost Liberty, Part 3

By on April 2, 2008 8

The Libertarian Nation Foundation website at libertariannation.org has been having the following problem:

Libertarian Nation Foundation 1. For some people, it worked if you didn’t put www in front of the address but not if you did.
2. For others, it didn’t work at all, with or without www.
3. For still others, it worked fine, again with or without www.

I guess (3) wasn’t really a problem, except insofar as it prevented those who, like me, were in group (3) from realising that there was a problem.

In any case, mighty webmaster Wayne Dawson thinks he’s fixed it. But he was in group (1) while I was in group (3), so it’s hard for us to tell whether problem (2) was fixed. Therefore: if you were previously in group (2), would you do me the favour of checking out the link, both with and without the www, and letting me know whether it works? Muchas gracias!

Celebrity Death Match: Bastiat vs. Proudhon

By on March 12, 2008 6

[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.

Bastiat and Proudhon 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.

Dyer Straits

By on March 11, 2008 6

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’ve put the first half of Dyer Lum’s 1890 The Economics of Anarchy online. More to follow!

Dyer Lum I first heard of Dyer Lum from Frank Brooks, best known in libertarian circles today for his 1994 anthology of selections from Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. When I met Frank, around 1986, we were both grad students at Cornell (he in political science, I in philosophy), and we carpooled together down to my first IHS conference as he told me about this oddly named fellow he was writing his dissertation on. (Though in a movement that includes Lysander Spooner, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Anselme Bellegarrigue, and Voltairine de Cleyre, perhaps “Dyer Lum” isn’t such an odd name.)

Lum was a mutualist anarchist along lines broadly similar to Tucker’s, a kind of fusion of Spencer and Proudhon, though Lum had a more optimistic view of the prospects for unions as vehicles of the labour movement. (He also preferred Buddhism to Stirnerism – the Absence-of-Ego and Its Own? – but that aspect of his thought doesn’t come out in this work.) Apparently Lum and de Cleyre collaborated on a long anarchist novel, the manuscript for which has been maddeningly lost. Judging from The Economics of Anarchy, I find Lum a less clear writer than either Tucker or deCleyre – but still a fun read.

Coming tomorrow: the Bastiat-Proudhon debate!

Sins of the Father

By on February 21, 2008 5

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

NO MEXICAN TRUCKS Robert Higgs confesses a dark secret from his family’s past:

[M]y father had done something quite remarkable: he had left the sovereign state of Oklahoma, crossed the sovereign states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and entered into and established permanent residence in the sovereign state of California, all without the permission of any of the rulers of these states. Imagine that! …

Many of the Mexican children with whom I grew up might have told a tale similar to mine. The only difference would have been that for them, the origin of their migration to California happened to be not one of the states of the United States of America, commonly known as America, but one of the states of the United Mexican States, commonly known as Mexico. Was this difference important? If so, why? Do the lines that government officials draw on maps sever the heart of humanity?

Read, comme l’on dit, the whole thing.

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