Tag Archives | Praxeology

Molto Grazie

They say nobody knows you when you’re down and out – but wow, it sure isn’t true in my case. The outpouring of support and assistance from the libertarian community has been tremendous – over $5000 in gifts and loans in just two days, from all around the world, whether from old friends or from people I’ve never even met. To say that it has exceeded my expectations would be an understatement; it simply takes my breath away. Thank you all so much.

Once I’ve got my own situation together again I’d like to do what I can to “pay it forward” by contributing in some way to the creation and funding of some sort of libertarian mutual-aid network. Any thoughts or suggestions on how this might work?

In other news, my radio interview from this afternoon with “Little Alex in Wonderland” is now online to play or download. We ended up talking about natural law, racism, children’s rights, anarchism, class conflict theory, and left-libertarianism rather than about agorism specifically. He also has interviews available with Scott Horton (just before me on today’s show) and Gary Chartier (from the previous show), which I haven’t had a chance to listen to yet.


Radical Spencerians Online

Radical Spencerians like Auberon Herbert and Wordworth Donisthorpe represent an interesting bridge between the “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of libertarianism, palling around with the Liberty and Property Defence League on the one hand and Benjamin Tucker on the other (and being hailed by the latter as fellow anarchists – evidently the benighted Tucker had never had a chance to read the AFAQ).

Auberon Herbert, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and Richard Harding DavisI see that Google Books now offers some previously hard-to-find works by Herbert and Donisthorpe. One is Herbert’s A Politician In Trouble About His Soul (1884), a presentation of political philosophy in dialogue form. The quasi-anarchistic last chapter is widely reprinted as a separate article under the title “A Politician In Sight of Haven,” but the full work has not previously been available online.

There are also four books by Donisthorpe: Principles of Plutology (1876), Individualism: A System of Politics (1889), Law in a Free State (1895), and Down the Stream of Civilization (1898). Of these the second and third have been available online for a while, but the first and the fourth have not.

Down the Stream is a memoir of Donisthorpe’s travels in the Mediterranean; his sometimes bigoted opinions can make it annoying (anomalously for a radical Spencerian and an anarchist, he was an apologist for British imperialism), but it is also witty and enjoyable, and makes a nice pairing with Richard Harding Davis’s somewhat similar Rulers of the Mediterranean (1894), also newly available on Google Books. Rothbard speaks highly of Plutology in his History of Economic Thought. Left-libertarians will be especially interested in Donisthorpe’s theories of “labour capitalisation” in chapters 6 and 7 of Individualism and chapter 8 of Law in a Free State.


Radio Free Roderick, Redux

I’m going to be interviewed on Chicago’s Little Alex in Wonderland radio show this coming Thursday at 4:00 Central; we’ll probably be talking about agorism. (I was interviewed last week on James Hines’ New Orleans Saint and Fools radio show, but it doesn’t seem to be online yet; the topic was the use of logical fallacies in political discourse.)


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