CALL FOR PAPERS

The Molinari Society will be hosting its sixth annual symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, December 27-30, 2009. We hereby invite the submission of papers on the topic of intellectual property (IP).

IP has long been a matter of debate among libertarians. For its defenders, it represents a just protection of innovators’ rights to the products of their labour, as well as a vital economic incentive for creative effort; for its opponents, it is one more state-granted monopoly privilege with elements of protectionism and censorship. The issues raised by IP seem especially urgent in the present age of electronic media, when the ease of copying and disseminating information is at an all-time high; and the legitimacy or otherwise of IP has recently become an especially hot topic of discussion in the libersphere in the wake of the long-anticipated publication of Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s book Against Intellectual Monopoly (as well as the re-release of Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property in book form).

Those submitting papers should be prepared, if selected, to present their papers at the December meeting.

Send submissions to Roderick T. Long at:
BerserkRL@yahoo.com

Deadline for receiving submissions: 5 May 2009
Notification of acceptance / rejection: 15 May 2009

Murray Rothbard praised Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude as one of the greatest libertarian works of all time. But did La Boétie actually write it? Some recent research indicates that it Montaigne might be the real author.

The two latest issues, 21.3 and 21.4, of the Journal of Libertarian Studies will be the last (at least in a print version) for a while, as the journal is going on hiatus. (Watch this space for updates.) This fact makes these two issues collector’s items, and you will naturally want to buy extra copies in enormous quantities!

So what’s in the issues? First, 21.3:

• Since libertarian philosophy professor Richard Sharvy’s death in 1988, his entertaining anti-relativist polemic “Who’s to Say What’s Right or Wrong?: People Who Have Ph.D.s in Philosophy, That’s Who” has circulated for years as an undergrad classic among academic philosophers, since it says all the things that most philosophers secretly think but are too polite to voice. This, at long last, is its first publication in print, and its first textually complete publication anywhere; and it is already stirring controversy once again.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe has argued that libertarians’ traditional support for open borders is based on a mistaken application of libertarian principle, and that, so long as states and state-owned resources exist, immigration restrictions are less of an injustice than the forced integration involved in a governmental policy of open borders. In “On Immigration: Reply to Hoppe,” Anthony Gregory and Walter Block
  dispute Hoppe’s claim that immigration restrictions serve as a check on state power, and argue that the Hoppean position, if taken to its logical conclusion, would also require the rejection of free trade.
• According to Lockean theories of property rights, we are entitled to ownership over the products of our labor. Why doesn’t this imply that women own their children?
  In her book Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Moller Okin raises this question as a reductio ad absurdum against Robert Nozick’s account of just acquisition in his classic libertarian treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In defense of Nozick, Anna-Karin Andersson argues in “An Alleged Contradiction in Nozick’s Entitlement Theory argues that Okin’s critique fails – first, because it is not clear that parents produce their children in the relevant sense, and second, because even if it is granted that parents produce their children, there are non-arbitrary reasons for treating products with a capacity for rational agency differently from products without.
• Given French social theorist Raymond Aron’s state-socialist background, one might not expect to find much in his thought congenial to libertarianism. But in “Raymond Aron and the Intellectuals: Arguments Supportive of Libertarianism” James R. Garland argues that Aron’s critiques of political rationalism and authoritarianism (and the role of court intellectuals in promoting these) point most naturally in a libertarian direction.
• Over his career John Gray has shifted from Hayekian classical liberal to right-wing communitarian to left-wing communitarian. (For a sense of the shift, compare the original, emphatically pro-Hayek 1984 text of Gray’s Hayek on Liberty with the virulently anti-Hayek postscript added in 1998.) In “Gray’s Progress: From Liberalisms to Enlightenment’s Wake,” Jeremy Shearmur traces the evolution of Gray’s thought from 1989 through 1995. He finds much that is valuable in Gray’s work, but worries that Gray tends to attack simplistic straw-man versions of the rather more nuanced positions he formerly held; and Shearmur concludes that while Gray’s criticisms of epistemological foundationalism are well-founded, his further inference that Enlightenment liberalism must fall along with foundationalism is not.
• While the late Jane Jacobs was not a libertarian, her work in urban theory – and most notably her books The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities,
  with their critique of the arrogant rationalism of urban planning – have won her a following in libertarian circles. In “The Death and Life of a Reluctant Urban Icon,” Pierre Desrochers reviews Alice Sparberg Alexiou’s recent study
  Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, and finds that while it contains much interesting material, it shows little appreciation of Jacobs’ Canadian background or semi-Austrian economic insights.
• It is widely assumed that during the Middle Ages, education was a) primarily religious and b) confined to a tiny elite. In a Review of Nicholas Orme’ Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. finds that Orme offers a convincing case for pre-university education’s being far more widely available, and far more secular, in medieval England, at any rate, than is ordinarily supposed.

What about issue 21.4?

• The first half of 21.4 is devoted to a symposium in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, a book whose influence on the libertarian movement has been incalculable. Simultaneously a mystery, a love story, a science-fiction adventure, a philosophical treatise, an ethical and political manifesto, a moral vindication of commerce and industry, and a dramatization of libertarian class analysis (as the industrious classes go on strike against the parasitic state and its privileged beneficiaries), Atlas Shrugged offered a powerful and inspiring case, both intellectual and emotional, for libertarian ideas at a time when such resources were thin on the ground. While the relationship of Rand and her ideas to the broader libertarian movement would often be a controversial and troubled one, Atlas Shrugged undeniably played a crucial role in helping both to create new advocates of laissez-faire and to radicalize existing ones, as well as encouraging libertarians to view their standpoint as an alternative to, rather than a branch of, conservatism, and to base the case for liberty on moral principle and not on pragmatic economic benefits alone.

  “Atlas Shrugged at Fifty,” a retrospective from Rand’s former associate Barbara Branden (author of the pathbreaking biography The Passion of Ayn Rand), conveys something of the initial excitement produced by the book’s publication, as do a pair of contemporary “Letters to Ayn Rand” – essentially fan letters about Atlas Shrugged – from Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, two of the leading figures in the Austrian School of economics and indeed the libertarian movement more broadly. (The eventual rupture of Rand’s relations with Rothbard and Branden casts a discernible shadow over their contributions – as presentiment in the former and memory in the latter. And it should be said that Rothbard’s later assessment of Rand’s ideas and influence was significantly less positive than the unbridled enthusiasm expressed in his 1957 letter.) An additional early piece by Rothbard, “Romanticism and Modern Fiction,” manifests his appreciation not only for the political ideas expressed in the novel but for Rand’s aesthetic theories as embodied in its composition. Both Rothbard pieces are previously unpublished.

  (I would like to add that if, as a New Hampshire teenager beginning my exploration of libertarian literature, I had known that I would one day be editing and introducing a volume containing pieces by Mises, Rothbard, and Branden commenting on Rand, I would have been giddy!)

  Rounding out the symposium are a pair of essays on Atlas Shrugged and its ideas by two rising libertarian scholars: Geoffrey Allan Plauché’s “Atlas Shrugged and the Importance of Dramatizing Our Values” explores the novel’s relation to genre fiction, Randian aesthetics, and Étienne de la Boétie’s theories of voluntary servitude, while Jennifer Baker’s “Money is the Product of Virtue: Tensions in Rand’s Invocation of Market Success” strives to separate the more from the less defensible aspects of the novel’s portrayal of the relationship between virtue and worldly accomplishment.

• The second half of 21.4 begins with Robert Higgs’s article “If Men Were Angels: The Basic Analytics of the State versus Self-Government.” James Madison famously quipped that if men were angels, governments would be unnecessary. Mancur Olson has added that life without government would be economically counter-productive, as the need to guard against theft would lower incentives to produce. In response to Madison, Higgs argues that, given our non-angelic nature, we should expect far worse results from governments than from anarchy; while against Olson Higgs maintains that the threat of theft by the state itself is far more harmful to production than the forms of theft that the state succeeds in suppressing.
• Economists John Hartwick and Robert Solow have recently developed a suggestion from philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice to the effect that government should intervene to ensure that the present generation’s use of resources follows investment rules designed to secure an adequate consumption level for future generations. In “Rawlsian Investment Rules for ‘Intergenerational Equity’:
  Breaches of Method and Ethics,” John Brätland offers two kinds of criticism of the Hartwick-Solow proposal. First, Brätland argues, on Austrian grounds, that the formal constructs with which Hartwick and Solow work are incompatible with economic subjectivism; second, he charges that their policy prescriptions illegitimately presuppose a governmental origin for property rights.
• Contemporary approaches to the theory of international relations are generally empirical. But if, as Austrians such as Mises and Hoppe have argued, it is possible to identify a systematic body of a priori truths about human action, then, Mark R. Crovelli suggests, it may be possible to place the theory of international relations on an aprioristic basis as well. In “Toward an A Priori Theory of International Relations,” Crovelli considers the implications for international relations of such basic praxeological principles as time-preference and the ex ante benefits of trade, concluding that state intervention necessarily lowers social welfare and that democratic societies will tend to be more militarily aggressive.
• Friedrich Hayek stresses that the spontaneous evolution of benign social coordination depends on a liberal framework of abstract rules; but the characteristics that Hayek attributes to a liberal framework, Frank Daumann worries, do not seem to support individual freedom as directly as Hayek supposes, as they are consistent with some quite illiberal content. In “Evolution and the Rule of Law: Hayek’s Concept of Liberal Order Reconsidered” Daumann argues that this deficiency can be remedied by game-theoretic considerations, as the incentives associated with prisoner’s-dilemma situation will tend to favour the emrgence of rules with liberal content.
• A broken window is socially beneficial, it may seem, because the need to repair it provides work for the glazier, whose added income benefits those whose goods and services he in turn purchases, and so on throughout the entire economy. Such reasoning has famously been criticized by Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt, who argue that such social benefits are illusory, since they depend on ignoring the alternative purchases that the owner of the window would have made, likewise spreading throughout the economy, had the window not been broken. In “Bastiat’s ‘The Broken Window’: A Critique,” Louis Carabini charges that Bastiat and Hazlitt have not gone far enough – that they have given the impression that the broken window has merely made society no better off, when in fact it has made the community worse off by necessitating expenditure that merely restores social welfare to its pre-breakage point rather than advancing it beyond that point.

Copies of either or both issues may be purchased here.

Over the course of several months from late 1849 through early 1850, French classical liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat and French anarcho-socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon conducted a lengthy debate on the nature and legitimacy of interest.

In 1879, an English translation (by American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker) appeared – but incomplete, and in an obscure venue.

Thus 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.

Check out the Bastiat-Proudhon Debate.

To what extent, then, is Mises a radical? He comes out as quite radical in the gradal and dialectical senses, albeit less so than some of his later followers. With regard to ideological radicalism, he scores high on the political dimension and admittedly much lower — though not quite so low as one might initially suppose — on the sociocultural dimension. I conclude that Mises’s overall orientation is far more radical than not, and that his legacy is accordingly an attractive and inspiring one for those who are radical in all of the above senses.
FULL ARTICLE

Edmund Burke always claimed that his 1756 defense of anarchism, A Vindication of Natural Society, was intended satirically, and most Burke scholars have agreed.

In a 1958 article, Murray Rothbard argued that Burke’s youthful anarchism was sincere, and that his later repudiation was politically motivated. But few Burke specialists were swayed. (Readers with JSTOR access can see one reply.)

But in his 1977 Burke biography, Isaac Kramnick offers some evidence in at least partial support of Rothbard’s interpretation – for it turns out that some of the allegedly ironic passages in the Vindication have close parallels in Burkean texts generally agreed to be sincere.

Check out the relevant excerpts from Kramnick.

The text of my contribution to the Mises Institute’s 25th anniversary conference is now online.

Issue 21.2 of the Journal of Libertarian Studies offers a variety of perspectives on constitutional interpretation, American democracy, and alternatives to state provision of law, prisons, and welfare.

• Defenders of the welfare state often assume that without tax-funded aid to the needy, private charity would be inadequate to fill the gap. In “The Costs of Public Income Redistribution and Private Charity,” James Rolph Edwards challenges this assumption. Thanks to competition, Edwards argues, private charities are more efficient, rarely losing more than 30% of their revenue to overhead, compared with the 70% absorbed by overhead in government welfare programs. Private charities also have a better track record than welfare programs in helping recipients become independent, while lacking the negative impact on economic growth (and thus on the source from which charitable provision derives) that comes with forcible redistribution. Hence, Edwards concludes, there is every reason to expect private charity to be far more effective than government programs. (Incidentally, a reader recently pointed me to this New York Times story complaining that “[f]or every three dollars they [private donors] give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.” It might be worth keeping Edwards’ data in mind in evaluating such concerns.)
• If, as libertarian anarchists contend, competitive, market-based legal institutions are more economically efficient than monopolistic governmental ones, why don’t anarchist proposals encounter a more favorable reception? In “Democracy in America and the Possibilities for Law Without the State,” Brian Smith argues that in assessing the prospects for statelessness we must take into account not only economic incentives but also cultural values. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of how the democratization of culture erodes aristocratic mores and promotes political centralization, and noting that such aristocratic mores bear a strong resemblance to those which govern stateless societies, Smith suggests that democratization accordingly poses an obstacle to the successful implementation of a stateless legal order. But Tocquevillean considerations also afford the anarchist some reason for hope, as increasingly effective means of communication foster the media’s role in building private associations.
• That the Jacksonian Democrats were far from libertarian in their policies on slavery and Indian relocation is well-known; but with regard to the liberties of whites, or at least of white males, they are often credited with a proto-libertarian commitment to economic individualism and laissez-faire. In “The Limits of Jacksonian Liberalism: Individualism, Dissent, and the Gospel of Andrew According to Lysander Spooner,” Raymond James Krohn argues that the Jacksonians were far less pro-market than their reputation, and contrasts their record, which Krohn sees as patriarchal and conservative, with that of their contemporary, radical libertarian Lysander Spooner. Krohn regards Jacksonian opposition to the Bank of the United States, for example, as motivated more by a general distrust of mercantile society than by the kind of specifically libertarian opposition to governmental grants of monopoly one finds in Spooner. Even Spooner’s challenge – both in his theoretical writings and in his entrepreneurial practice – to the U.S. postal monopoly contrasts with the Jacksonians’ defense of the postal monopoly as a tool of political patronage.
• The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 case Kelo v. City of New London, upholding the right of local jurisdictions to employ their eminent domain powers on behalf of private developers, has divided libertarians. For some, the Court should have struck down the local statue as a violation of property rights and an illegitimate stretching of the concept of “public use.” For others, the Court should have declined jurisdiction in the interest of federalism and decentralization. Laurence M. Vance falls into the latter camp; in “The Kelo Decision and the Fourteenth Amendment.” Vance argues that the Bill of Rights, including the constitutional restriction on eminent domain, was originally intended to apply only to the Federal government and not to the states, and that, contrary to the doctrine of “incorporation,” nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment is properly interpreted as extending the Bill of Rights to the States. Vance also maintains that our liberties are better protected by decentralization than by centralism; that government has been seizing so much property for so long and for so many purposes at both national and local levels that Kelo can hardly constitute the watershed threat to property rights that its critics have implied; and that the Kelo decision has actually helped the cause of property rights by inspiring a flurry of state-level legislation limiting eminent domain.
• In “Eminent Domain and Economic Development: The Mill Acts and the Origins of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism,” David M. Gold takes a less favorable view of Kelo than does Vance (and also, it turns out, a more favorable view of the Jacksonian Democrats than does Krohn). For Gold, Kelo represents the Court’s continuing decline away from the laissez-faire constitutionalism of the Supreme Court’s Lochner era, when local violations of property rights were frequently struck down by the Supreme Court. This laissez-faire constitutionalism has often been interpreted as a defense of wealthy business interests against anti-business legislation; Gold argues, by contrast, that laissez-faire constitutionalism originated in a Jacksonian defense of ordinary people against pro-business legislation – of which the Mill Acts (essentially the exercise of eminent domain on behalf of mill owners) represent a paradigm case.
• Alexander Tabarrok’s anthology Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime brings together a number of essays defending the privatization of prisons. In his review, Daniel J. D’Amico praises the collection for the extent to which it breaks with conventional wisdom, but nevertheless finds fault with most of the contributions for their reliance on a social-contract theory of state legitimacy and a confusion of genuine privatization with the mere contracting-out of government services. The chief exception, D’Amico maintains, is Bruce Benson’s chapter, which identifies the aggressive character of the state, and argues that the contracting-out of prison services achieves only technological efficiency, while falling short of the allocative efficiency that actual privatization would bring.
• The system of customary law which has traditionally prevailed throughout most of Somalia is often viewed as an archaic impediment to legal progress. The late Michael van Notten’s book The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa, completed by Spencer Heath MacCallum, argues that Somali customary law is actually superior to statutory law, and provides a promising basis for a system of prosperous freeports without central government. (See also other recent discussions of Somali statelessness here.) In his review, Norbert Lennartz recommends the book as useful to several different audiences: libertarians and students of law and social science, who can learn about another successful example of stateless legal order; entrepreneurs, who could benefit from the favorable economic climate offered by Somali law; and Somalis, who could usefully implement van Notten’s and MacCallum’s suggestion of clan-owned freeports.

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Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty was the foremost organ of 19th-century American individualist anarchism, and a major influence on Murray Rothbard and modern libertarianism; contributors to Liberty included such prominent free-market luminaries as Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, and Vilfredo Pareto. (For background, see articles by Wendy McElroy and Carl Watner.)

Regrettably, copies of Liberty have been damnably hard to find – until now. The amazing Shawn Wilbur has just finished posting the entire run of Liberty in PDF form on his website. Details here.

The interface is bare-bones at the moment, but Shawn has plans for text-search capacity and other cool stuff.

As he urges: “download, download, download!” to ensure that “there is never again any question of Liberty not being available.”

Next year, 2008, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) – abolitionist, anarchist, postal entrepreneur, and the leading legal theorist of 19th-century libertarianism.

Today Spooner is best known for his 1867-70 No Treason series of pamphlets attacking the authority of the Constitution (and by implication government generally) and defending the right of secession. Murray Rothbard called No Treason “the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written.”

But Spooner’s interests ranged still more broadly, touching on nearly every aspect of the moral, economic, and legal case for a free society. Over a fifty-year writing career Spooner penned defenses of jury nullification, deist theology, natural law, and Irish revolution; as well as critiques of slavery, victimless-crime laws, the postal monopoly, and both sides in the U. S. Civil War. He also developed controversial theories of legal interpretation (according to which, e.g., slavery was unconstitutional regardless of the framers’ intentions) and of property rights (including a case for making the term of patents and copyrights perpetual); produced numerous economic tracts on banking and currency reform; and drew up plans for guerilla warfare to liberate slaves. (Note: most of Spooner’s writings are available online here; a few more can be found here.)

In honour of the upcoming Spooner bicentenary, the Journal of Libertarian Studies is planning a special symposium issue on Spooner. Submissions dealing with any aspect of Spooner’s life and thought are hereby solicited. Articles may be historical, interpretive, or critical; comparisons of Spooner to other figures are also welcome. Submissions should be sent to JLS@mises.org by 1 April 2008.

Lysander Spooner was the foremost legal theorist of the 19th-century American individualist anarchist movement. His 1882 open letter to Senator Bayard is fairly well-known among Spooner fans; but an 1886 sequel, A Second Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, which originally appeared in Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist journal Liberty, is much more obscure; it was omitted (like most of Spooner’s periodical work) from the Collected Works, and indeed has never (so far as I can determine) been reprinted anywhere else. Now at last I am happy to announce that it is available in the Molinari Institute online library.

I can’t claim that this is one of Spooner’s more important works. Apart from a more than usually irascible tone, it contains little that isn’t already covered in the first letter, or still more fully in other works such as No Treason or Natural Law or the Letter to Grover Cleveland. But hey, it’s Spooner.

And speaking of material from Tucker’s Liberty, hurray for Shawn Wilbur! He’s been scanning issues of Liberty (including the one containing this Spooner piece) and placing the PDFs online. Check out what he’s got so far.

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, in 1977, was devoted to a symposium on Robert Nozick’s attempt, in his landmark work Anarchy, State, and Utopia, to justify the minimal state against the case, by Murray Rothbard and others, for free-market anarchy. In the years since, the debate among libertarians as to the necessity and desirability of the state has continued. Inasmuch as 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, it seems appropriate to commemorate the date by devoting a symposium issue, 21.1, to the anarchist/minarchist controversy.

• Nozick had argued that in a free-market anarchy, a dominant protection agency (DPA) would be justified in using force to ban its competitors (thereby evolving into a justified monopoly state) in order to protect its customers from risky judicial procedures, so long as “independents” – those who wished to engage in rights-enforcement without the DPA’s involvement – are compensated. In “Nozick’s Failed Defense of the Just State,” Eric Roark maintains that Nozick has not shown that a ban on risky procedures could justly be extended to all independents, and also argues against the existence of the procedural rights on which Nozick’s case depends.
• 
  In a previous exchange, Randall Holcombe had argued that government, however undesirable it may be, is inevitable, since any stateless region is likely to be swiftly conquered by either an existing or a newly arising state; hence, rather than fighting the state, we should be working to construct the best state we can, lest a worse one be imposed on us by others. Walter Block had replied that government cannot be inevitable since it has not prevailed everywhere, and had taken issue with some of Holcombe’s examples. Now in “Is Government Really Inevitable?,” Holcombe responds that Block has mistakenly read Holcombe as arguing for the logical inevitability of government, whereas Holcombe meant only that government was inevitable given prevailing human characteristics and motivations; he also defends his examples, arguing that in any case government is more prevalent than Block recognizes. In “Rejoinder to Holcombe on the Inevitability of Government,” Block charges that Holcombe has retreated to a less interesting thesis, and adds that in any case government would still be worth combating even if it were inevitable.
• Tibor Machan has argued previously (abstract here) that the disagreement between anarchists and minarchists is merely verbal, since the sorts of private protection agencies that market anarchists favor would necessarily have to enjoy the same sort of territorial monopoly that minarchists claim for the state. In “Anarchism and Minarchism; No Rapprochement Possible: Reply to Tibor Machan,” Walter Block retorts that anarchism and minarchism are essentially incompatible, and denies that any territorial monopoly is necessary in the provision of legal services; in “Defining Government, Begging the Question: An Answer to Walter Block’s Reply,” Machan maintains that Block fails to answer Machan’s case for territorial monopoly, and charges Block with begging the question against Machan by defining government as essentially coercive.
• In “Contra Anarcho-Capitalism,” a critique of several market anarchist pieces including one of mine, Jordan Schneider argues that market-based law is impracticable because markets cannot provide either objectivity or a final arbiter, and also because firms will have an incentive to become abusive. “Anarchy Defended: Reply to Schneider,” I maintain that markets can provide objectivity, do not need to provide a final arbiter, and constitute a checks-and-balances restraint on incentives to abuse power.

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Issue 20.4 of the Journal of Libertarian Studies brings an especially interdisciplinary range of offerings, including contributions in history, philosophy, economic theory, and film criticism.

• While Murray Rothbard wore many hats – economist, historian, cultural critic – Marcus Verhaegh focuses on “Rothbard as a Political Philosopher.” He suggests that of the various strands that Rothbard seeks to synthesize in his political philosophy (Thomistic natural law, Lockean liberalism, individualist anarchism, etc.), one of the most important, but most neglected, is an opposition to Rousseau. Verhaegh argues that many of Rothbard’s disagreements with Immanuel Kant and Robert Nozick turn in crucial ways on the anti-Rousseau elements in his thought. Finally, Verhaegh defends Rothbard against Kant and Nozick on some points, and Kant and Nozick against Rothbard on others.
• In light of the recent disaster of hurricane Katrina, where government-operated levees spectacularly failed, but where the effectiveness of nongovernmental alternatives is widely doubted, Philipp Bagus’s contribution “Wresting Land from the Sea: An Argument Against Public Goods Theory” is especially timely. Against the assumption that dikes and levees are “public goods” that can only be provided by government, Bagus offers both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence (the latter from the medieval and early modern German experience with private dikes) to defend the sufficiency of market mechanisms to hold back the waters.
• In academic philosophy the best known and most influential article ever written on the subject of abortion is Judith Thomson’s 1971 article “A Defense of Abortion,” often regarded as the classic statement of what has since been known as the “self-defense” or “eviction” justification of abortion. Thomson’s arguments are often criticized, however, for their reliance on weak or strained analogies (including, famously, that between aborting an unwanted fetus and unplugging one’s kidneys from an unconscious violinist). Michael Watkins argues, in “Re-reading Thomson: Thomson’s Unanswered Challenge,” that Thomson’s arguments have been widely misunderstood, and are in fact not arguments by analogy (strained or otherwise) at all, but rather, successful arguments by counterexample against the premises of anti-abortion arguments.
• The Neo-Realist movement in Italian postwar film is usually regarded as leftwing, even Communist-leaning, in its political sympathies. But in “Communism and the Ironic Value of Property in Italian Neo-Realist Cinema,” John R. Hamilton examines the ways in which such major contributions to the genre as Bicycle Thieves and La Terra Trema inadvertently give voice to the value, for the poor above all, of entrepreneurship and the private ownership of capital.
• In his book Catastrophe: Risk and Response, Richard Posner presents a number of doomsday scenarios – wayward asteroids, global warming, supercollider accidents, bioterrorism, and rebellious robots (both regular and nano-sized) – each of which, in his view, calls for increased state power to prevent humanity’s extinction. In a review of Posner’s book, J. H. Huebert counters that most of these threats, to the extent that they are genuine, are actually caused or exacerbated by the state, and that in any case governmental solutions are likely to be less efficient and more harmful than voluntary ones.
• Randall Holcombe’s book From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of Americam Government traces the evolution of the United States from its beginnings as a minimalist Jeffersonian republic to the swollen leviathan of modern times, and places the blame on democracy. Employing public-choice analysis, Holcombe argues that democracy, far from being the natural guarantor of individual liberty, tends instead to undermine it. In his review Ludwig van den Hauwe finds Holcombe’s reasoning largely congenial, but regrets Holcombe’s neglect of libertarian and New Left historical revisionism and his unwillingness to carry his reasoning through to the conclusion of anarchism.
• Finally, Leigh K. Jenco reviews two recent books on China. She finds William Kirby’s anthology Realms of Freedom in Modern China to be a largely valuable, though occasionally ethnocentric, exploration of the growing variety of unexpected avenues for local autonomy and individual choice in contemporary Chinese society. She is less enthusiastic about William de Bary’s defense of Confucian values as a model for global ethics in his Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good, which to Jenco’s mind, despite some virtues, attempts to squeeze Confucian thought into a decidedly western – and anticapitalist – mold. She closes by suggesting the importance of libertarian perspectives to the current “Asian values” debate.

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[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Liberty & Power]

My copy of Ed Stringham’s anthology Anarchy and the Law just arrived in the mail. (Amazon insists that the paperback isn’t available yet, but they’re wrong.)

This nearly 700-page book is quite simply the definitive collection on free-market anarchism. Its forty chapters include contributions from Randy Barnett, Bruce Benson, Bryan Caplan, Roy Childs, Anthony de Jasay, David Friedman, John Hasnas, Hans Hoppe, Jeff Hummel, Don Lavoie, Murray Rothbard, the Tannehills, and many more, including even your humble correspondent. It also features historical classics by Voltairine de Cleyre, Gustave de Molinari, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker, among others. It covers both moral arguments and economic ones; it ranges over both abstract theory and historical examples. It even includes important criticisms of market anarchism, like Tyler Cowen’s and Robert Nozick’s, along with anarchist replies. Check out the full table of contents.

Are there any regrettable omissions? Well, of course. Any self-respecting anarchist geek could easily cite another thousand pages’ worth of “absolutely essential” additional material, additional authors, additional perspectives. But never mind: this, here and now, is it. Wonder no more what is the market anarchist book to recommend to the anarcho-curious or wave menacingly at the statist heathen; it’s this one.

The Journal of Libertarian Studies continues to bring you exciting cutting-edge scholarship in libertarian theory. Here’s what you’ll find in issue 20.3:

• One of the most popular contemporary arguments for the state comes from game theorists, who tend to model interaction without the state as a coordination problem which can be solved only by centrally imposed governmental force. But in “Fallacies in the Theories of the Emergence of the State,” Bertrand Lemennicier argues that such game-theoretic arguments routinely disregard the variety of ways in which, once the participants of a coordination problem recognize the payoff structure of the situation they are in, they have a clear incentive to take advantage of a number of available means of altering that situation. Lemennicier’s analysis makes the case for a far more optimistic view of the prospects for successful cooperation in the absence of the state.
• The common assumption that the state is necessary for national defense has been criticized by free-market anarchists, who often point to the possibility of market provision of military protection. But, notes Carl Watner, these anarchist critics have too often neglected the possibility of modes of protection that are not only nonstate but also nonmilitary and nonviolent. In “Without Firing a Shot: Societal Defense and Voluntaryist Resistance,” Watner draws on libertarian theory, civilian defense theory, and historical examples to argue that nonviolent mass disobedience can be far more effective in resisting an invader than is generally recognized, inasmuch as such resistance exploits the fact that governmental power depends crucially on the acquiescence of those it subjugates.
• Barry D. Simpson sets out to show how the work of nineteenth-century educational theorist Robert Lewis Dabney anticipates and complements, in certain respects, contemporary libertarian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s critique of democracy. In “The Cultural Degradation of Universal Education: The Educational Views of Robert Lewis Dabney,” Simpson explains Dabney’s arguments that state-mandated universal education tends, not to bring the least educated up to the level of the best educated, but rather the reverse; that by awakening aspirations without providing the means of satisfying them, it tends to an increase in crime and incivility; and that insofar as it is administered by the state, education will inevitably have its content dictated by the power struggles of special interests rather than by the desires of parents or the needs of children.
• Some nine years ago Walter Block and the late Milton Friedman exchanged a number of letters debating the roles of moderation and gradualism versus radical extremism in making the case for liberty, with Friedman, often a free-market extremist in the eyes of the economic profession generally, playing the moderate relative to Block’s more radical libertarianism. A few months ago Dr. Friedman graciously granted permission for this exchange to be published in the JLS; as this issue went to press, we could not have known that its publication would coincide with Friedman’s death, but the unexpected timing gives the journal a fitting opportunity to pay tribute to a great champion of liberty. “Fanatical, Not Reasonable: A Short Correspondence Between Walter Block and Milton Friedman” may thus be said to represent both, excitingly, Friedman’s first publication in the JLS, and, sadly, his last publication during his lifetime.
• David Conway has argued that classical liberals should defend nationalism against the claims of supranational entities like the European Union on the one hand, and against the decentralist arguments of secessionists and anarchists on the other. J. C. Lester, in a review of Conway’s book In Defence of the Realm: The Place of Nations in Classical Liberalism, takes issue with Conway’s position from an anarcho-libertarian perspective, discussing issues ranging from immigration and cultural group rights to 9/11 and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• Jacob T. Levy has maintained that the primary case for multiculturalist legislation lies in its potential to block the oppression of some cultures by others. In a review of Levy’s book The Multiculturalism of Fear, Marcus Verhaegh worries that Levy’s approach manifests an uneasy tension between suspicion of particularist identities on the one hand and suspicion of attempts to suppress such identities on the other; Verhaegh suggests that a more positive appreciation for particularist identities can be reconciled with the kind of protection from oppression that Levy seeks by embracing a more decentralist, libertarian vision.
• Andrew P. Napolitano represents a perhaps surprising combination: former Superior Court judge, chief legal analyst for Fox News, and natural-law libertarian theorist. William L. Anderson reviews Napolitano’s book Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws, which details the myriad ways in which the U.S. government routinely abuses its power in defiance of the limited-government strictures embodied in the Constitution.

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Does imperialist centralization lead to a flourishing and cosmopolitan culture? I have frequently encountered this argument among friends of liberty. It is a version of the view that liberty sometimes must be imposed on people even if they are not culturally prepared for it. The problem with imposing liberal values by means of military force is that it tends to associate liberal values in the minds of the population with invasion and oppression. One is unlikely to be won over to the cause of women’s rights when those preaching on behalf of that cause have stolen your farm, shot your brother, and blown your children’s hands off with a land mine; indeed the cause of women’s rights is probably in the long run set farther back by such associations. FULL ARTICLE

Every time America goes off on one of its bombing or invading romps, resentment grows among the bombed and invaded. From this resentment sprout new threats to America’s security. To protect against these threats, America engages in further bombing and invading, which creates still more resentment, which breeds still new threats, prompting still more bombing and invading, and so on ad infinitum. Mises’s insight that interventions breed more interventions is as true in foreign policy as it is in domestic economy. And just as the logical endpoint of the cycle of economic interventions is complete socialism, so the logical endpoint of the cycle of military interventions is world conquest. FULL ARTICLE

When the Civil War came, many abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, abandoned their traditional anti-war, anti-state stance to support the Northern cause, in the hope that a Union victory would bring a quicker end to slavery. One abolitionist who stuck to his anti-war position and defended Southern secession was Ezra Heywood; his critique of the Garrisonian position is now online here. Commentary here.

Francis Tandy’s essay “Defence of Person and Property,” from his 1896 book Voluntary Socialism, is one of the early explorations of the idea that private protection agencies competing on the free market would be preferable to the State. This classic discussion is now online; read it here. Background info available here.