Sometimes people you come to know in passing leave a more-than-passing memory. Three such people have recently passed away in quick succession, and I wanted to mark their passings. 

Many readers of this blog may know, or know of, Chris Sciabarra, The Famous Dialectical Libertarian of Brooklyn, but far fewer have had the privilege, as I have, of meeting his late sister Elizabeth (1952-2022). To the best of my memory, I met her only twice; it may in fact only have been once, but she was the kind of person who would have left a double impression from a single encounter.

My first reaction on meeting her was that the two of them together seemed like characters in a Greco-Sicilian sit-com set in Brooklyn: where else would you get a gay dialectical-libertarian political theorist brother sharing a tiny Gravesend apartment with a straight, and straight-talking, public school principal, both sharing rhetorical barbs and Big Family love over pizza and gelato? But that was Chez Sciabarra for ya. My second reaction was an educator’s sense of kinship at meeting another member of my tribe: “Ski,” as they called her, was a teacher’s teacher who lived and breathed the educator’s vocation. As an educator myself, I could hear that in the way she spoke about teaching, about her students, and about her school. But it was so obvious that I suppose anyone else listening, educator or not, would hear the same thing.   

Elizabeth Sciabarra passed away on November 26th, at the age of 70, after a long illness. Here is Chris’s moving tribute to her. I cherish the time I spent in her company, but regret how little time that ended up being.

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I just learned from Sciabarra’s blog of the passing of the libertarian economist, Walter Grinder (1938-2022). I spent a summer in Walter’s company when I was a Jaqueline Hume Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies back in the summer of 1994; Walter and I met at the same coffee shop in Fairfax each morning to chat about whatever came to mind as the caffeine hit. I stayed in touch with him until roughly 2000, but for whatever reason–possibly my gradual departures and eventual apostasy from libertarianism–didn’t keep in touch thereafter. 

He was an enormously kind and generous person, a great wit and conversationalist, and a source both of great knowledge and of great humility–qualities that now seem conspicuous by their rarity in the libertarian movement. Whether accurately or not, I think of him as belonging to an earlier version of that movement, one more in touch with the humanistic impulses that animated its best aspirations.  Things weren’t the same at IHS after he left–or was ushered aside–and won’t be the same in the wider world now that he’s gone. I can’t say that I knew him well enough to do justice to his memory, but he’s also not the kind of person easily forgotten. He died on December 4th, at the age of 84. 

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I was genuinely shocked to learn of the passing, on December 2, of the political scientist Jeffrey Friedman at the age of 62 (1959-2022). Friedman was the founder and editor of Critical Review, a quasi-libertarian “Journal of Politics and Society” that had a huge influence on me, starting in my undergraduate years when it first came out, through the time I spent in the 2010’s as co-editor (with Carrie-Ann Biondi) of Reason Papers, which functioned, in its own way, as one of Critical Review’s decidedly small-time (and lower budget) “rivals.”

The truth is, Reason Papers was never really competitive with Critical Review, and we knew it couldn’t be, but we looked up to Critical Review as a model of scholarly rigor and intellectual excitement–at least when it embodied those qualities, which was not always, but often enough. Jeff’s specialty was, or became, political epistemology, or what might be called the epistemics of power; he did some brilliant work on the etiology of the 2008 financial crisis, and was, toward the end of his life, the author of a highly-acclaimed book, Power without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (2019). 

My first encounter with Jeff did not go well. I was in those days a dogmatic David Kelley-style Objectivist, a staunch defender of “the fundamentals of Rand’s system,” meaning, essentially, her epistemology and ethics. While I wasn’t nearly as staunch a libertarian as I was an Objectivist fundamentalist, I found Friedman’s criticisms of libertarianism tendentious and unfair, and decided to tell him so. We had a big, loud argument about consequentialism at some IHS shindig, followed by a yet louder (and much sillier) argument about whether or not David Kelley regarded Objectivism as a “closed” or “open” system. We left the argument, like minor characters in a David Lodge novel, devoutly hating each other, and stuck to that script for the next few decades. 

We reconciled maybe a decade ago, on discovering that both of us bore a serendipitous connection to the “white nationalist” (i.e., neo-Nazi) intellectual figure, Greg Johnson. Johnson had been Managing Editor of Critical Review, and of Reason Papers as well. Both Jeff and I had had the misfortune of dealing with him in the 1990s; he was a raging asshole even before his descent into the white nationalist miasma, but became more self-made ideological zombie than human being thereafter. The white nationalism and Nazi-philia came relatively late; the Greg we knew back in the day was simply a closeted and bigoted gay man, insufferably full of contempt for just about everyone on the planet, and acutely incapable of dealing with the reality of his own sexuality.

Greg’s unapologetic defense of ethnic cleansing provides a nice summary of what he was later to become. He started heading in this direction well before I discovered it; the discovery took awhile because, until 2009, Greg had been writing under a bunch of pseudonyms. It wasn’t until 2010 or so that he started writing in his own name–also about the time when Jeff and I decided to stop hating each other and start hating Greg instead. I don’t regret the decision. Though I can’t say that Jeff and I were best friends, we did exchange emails and phone calls on occasion, bathing luxuriously in mutually-enjoyable rancor for our fascist bete noire. 

You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. There was something genuinely surreal about our close encounters with Greg–hard to understand, I guess, until you come to discover the Julius Streicher in your own midst. I think Jeff and I both got a particularly perverse pleasure out of Greg’s psychopathic, classically obsessional anti-Semitism: Jeff was nominally Jewish (the son of a rabbi, no less), and I’d spent a decade living in a Jewish household; though neither of us were Jewish Jewish, both of us were, of necessity, the targets of Greg’s Jew-fixated lucubrations. Jeff had a Jewish past. I had a Jewish partner and family. We were, in short, both Jewish enough for any concentration camp Greg dreamed up for us.*

Jeff was the first to admit to being sort of charmed by that, and it wasn’t long before I broke down and admitted it, too. There’s something satisfying about having to process someone’s weirdly obsessional hatred for you, or at least for your kind, and while Aristotle may not have a category for a friendship based on so perverse a pleasure, Jeff and I sure did–ours.  I don’t mean to suggest that our friendship was based on shared rancor alone; I simply mean that it’s a huge relief to encounter someone who shares your hates, and is willing to get on the phone for an hour at a time to share them with you. 

To share an object of execration is to share a sense of justice. I never thought I’d say that I had a sense of justice in common with Jeffrey Friedman, but I’m now proud to say that I did. He left us far too early–a loss for wit, for scholarship, and above all, for justice. RIP.

*Prior to 2009, Johnson wrote under the pseudonym “T.C. Lynch,” among others.