[W]e must understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms, whose forms capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy, which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of society. . . .

Know well that there is nothing more counter-revolutionary than the Government. Whatever liberalism it pretends, whatever name it assumes, the Revolution repudiates it: its fate is to be absorbed in the industrial organization. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century.

Enter the Molinari Review

Shared Article from Austro-Athenian Empire

Molinari Review 1.1: What Lies Within? | Austro-Athenian Empire

[cross-posted at C4SS and BHL] The Molinari Institute (the parent organization of the Center for a Stateless Society) is proud to announce the publica…

Roderick @ aaeblog.com


Here’s an announcement from Roderick Long about the debut of the Molinari Review.

The Molinari Institute (the parent organization of the Center for a Stateless Society) is proud to announce the publication of the first issue of our new interdisciplinary, open-access, libertarian academic journal, the Molinari Review, edited by yours truly, and dedicated to publishing scholarship, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, very broadly understood. (See our original call for papers.)

You can order a copy here:

Print Kindle
Amazon US Amazon US
Amazon UK Amazon UK
CreateSpace Store

It should also be available, now or shortly, on other regional versions of Amazon. And later on it’ll be available from our website as a free PDF download (because copyright restrictions are evil).

mr1-1-coverphaze

So what’s in it?

In “The Right to Privacy Is Tocquevillean, Not Lockean: Why It Matters” Julio Rodman argues that traditional libertarian concerns with non-aggression, property rights, and negative liberty fail to capture the nature of our concern with privacy. Drawing on insights from Tocqueville and Foucault, Rodman suggests that privacy is primarily a matter, not of freedom from interference, but of freedom from observation, particularly accusatory observation.

In “Libertarianism and Privilege,” Billy Christmas charges that right-wing libertarians underestimate the extent and significance of harmful relations of privilege in society (including, but not limited to, class and gender privilege) because they misapply their own principles in focusing on proximate coercion to the exclusion of more indirect forms of coercion; but, he argues, broadening the lens of libertarian inquiry reveals that libertarian principles are more powerful tools for the analysis of privilege than privilege theorists generally suppose.

In “Capitalism, Free Enterprise, and Progress: Partners or Adversaries?,” Darian Nayfeld Worden interrogates traditional narratives of the Industrial Revolution. Distinguishing between capitalism (understood as a separation between labour and ownership/management) and free enterprise, Nayfeld Worden maintains that the rise of capitalism historically was in large part the result of a suppression of free enterprise, and that thanks to state intervention, the working-class benefited far less from industrialisation and technological innovation than they might otherwise have done.

In “Turning the Tables: The Pathologies and Unrealized Promise of Libertarianism,” Gus diZerega contends that libertarians misunderstand and misapply their own key concepts, leading them to embrace an atomistic vision of society, and to overvalue the market while undervaluing empathy and democracy. (Look for a reply or two in our next issue.)

Finally, Nathan Goodman reviews Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, an anthology edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano. Goodman praises the book for its illumination of many aspects of the intersection between anarchist tradition and the LGBTQ community, with particular emphasis on the tension between LGBTQ activists who seek to dismantle oppressive institutions and those who merely seek inclusion within them; but in the area of economics, he finds its authors to be too quick to dismiss the free market or to equate it with the prevailing regime of corporatist privilege.

Want to order a copy? See the ordering information above.

Want to contribute an article to an upcoming issue? Head to the journal’s webpage.

Want to support this project financially? Make a donation to the Molinari Institute General Fund.

— Roderick Long, Molinari Review 1.1: What Lies Within?
Austro-Athenian Empire (19 May 2016)

Return of Revenge of Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

2016-05-22 13.26.56

What I’ve been reading today: Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China

It’s a beautiful May day in the bright, sunny South. And it’s been a spell but I’ve been trying to keep things a bit more active once again here at the Rad Geek People’s Daily, and I feel like the time is right for a return to Shamelessness.

So, gentle reader, what have you been up to lately? What have you been working on? Got anything big coming up? Anything you’ve written lately? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Don’t hold back. Let’s get Shameless again.

A Mão Esquerda da Escuridão

So I don’t know if this is your thing, but if it is, you may have noticed that in all of the Iberian Romance languages, the most commonly used words for the left — the direction left, or on the left-hand side — are obviously related to each other: Castilian Spanish izquierdo, Catalan esquerre, Galego/Portuguese esquerdo, etc. — are all obviously related to each other, but none of them seem to bear any particular relation to the usual Latin word for left, which is sinister.[1] So then if they didn’t get it from granddaddy Latin, where’d they all get it? Well, the other day I learned that the answer is that when people give you directions on the Iberian peninsula, they’re all getting their word for left from Basque. Neat.

Shared Article from Wiktionary

ezker - Wiktionary

en.wiktionary.org


No Borders, No Question.

Here’s a great recent article by Jacob Hornberger:

Shared Article from fff.org

Open Borders Is the Only Libertarian Immigration Position

There is a common misconception in the libertarian movement that there are two positions on immigration within libertarianism: the position favoring o…

Jacob G. Hornberger @ fff.org


Of course it is. There’s no reasonable question about this. The fact that Right-wing cultural politics and American nationalism continue to bamboozle professed libertarians into believing that there is even the slightest compatibility between border controls and libertarian politics — and the fact that so many people within political libertarianism continue to prevaricate about the issue or shove it to one side, as if it were unimportant — the fact that anyone could take libertarianism to mean anything other than an uncompromising enemy of deportation, criminalization and exclusionist border control of any kind, is the shame of the so-called Liberty Movement.