A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post here called “Academic Hiring and Genocide,” in which I argued that genocidaires should, at the very least, be excluded from academic life, but ideally should be excluded from gainful employment itself. Whatever anyone thought of the argument, readers might have wondered about its practical relevance. “So Khawaja’s calling for the on-campus cancellation of ‘genocidaires’. Interesting vendetta, but how many genocidaires are there, anyway? And how many are actively seeking employment right now, including academic employment?” The New York Times reports that the “Defense Department [Is] to Cut Over 5,000” workers due to the Musk-Trump rampage against the “Deep State.” Could I possibly have meant them? Take a wild guess. Continue reading
Category Archives: anarchism
Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (2/5)
Stakeholders, Politicization, and Standing to Complain
This is part 2 of a five part series. For part 1, go here.
Background context: an institution accused of complicity in injustice counter-accuses its accusers of politicization and lack of standing.
Start with the politicization objection. The Stakeholders have two separate responses here.
Responding to the politicization objection. First, they point out that it’s not clear that the politicization of a previously apolitical scene is necessarily objectionable. Productiveness, order, and justice are three separate values whose relative value is far from self-evident. Given this, it’s obviously not the case that the value of productiveness and order so outweigh justice as to trump it altogether. Continue reading
Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (1/5)
Complicity and the Strategy of Evasion
Imagine that an institution (“the Institution”) maintains a set of investments in various enterprises that make a clear and demonstrable contribution to some indisputable injustice. Now suppose that a set of stakeholders (“the Stakeholders”) objects to these investments, calling on the Institution to divulge the facts in a fuller way, and demanding divestment from the clearly objectionable investments. Continue reading
Epistolary Sprouts in Brussels
The glorious ongoing Institut Coppet online collection of Gustave de Molinari’s Complete Works has brought to light some correspondence between Molinari and Proudhon from their years of Brussels exile during Napoléon III’s regime in France. The letters are few in number and are not ideologically substantive, but they are nonetheless interesting. So I’ve translated them. Enjoy!
“False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge”
Just a reminder to anyone attending the APA Eastern in New York this January: the Molinari Society is hosting a session on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge,” Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm, room TBA. Cory Massimino and I will be giving papers, with Roderick Long moderating and commenting. Cory’s paper is “Between Convergency and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality,” a defense of an advocacy-based conception of pedagogy, using the teaching I did under the Israeli occupation as a case study. For more details, click here.
On Love of Country
You’ve got to love a country where the President commutes the death sentences of 37 death row inmates, is widely praised for it, makes a pious speech about why the other three have to get the shaft for “terrorism,” and then, without a pause, continues committing genocide abroad while winning adulation for that. The part of the country fixated on the first part of that sentence is incomprehensible to the part fixated on the second, and vice versa. The day when the second group becomes large enough to be a real worry to the first is the day that we’ll witness the beginning of the end of the United States of America in the name of something better. It’s only when you grasp that the second group unapologetically wants to hasten that day that you’ll understand what the dispute was about in the first place. But believe me, we do.
Bienvenidos a la Resistencia
Witherspoon Presbyterian Church
Princeton, New Jersey
I joined the Defensa del Barrio committee yesterday of my local Resistencia chapter–in “defense of the neighborhood,” also known by its slogan, ICE Out of Princeton. It reminds me that when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a short story in which my friends and I were forced to some woodland redoubt just outside of town, to organize resistance to hostile forces that had somehow taken over. I guess the adults had dropped the ball, leaving the defense of the town in our hands. I don’t remember who the hostile forces in my story were, or what we ended up doing about them. I just find myself wondering whether the story was coincidence or prescience.
Continue readingFrom the Molinari Vaults
To my surprise I discover that I never uploaded the PDFs to the articles in the 2nd issue (2019!) of the Molinari Review. I’d intended to have an interval between print publication and web publication in order to incentivise people to buy the print edition, but I hadn’t intended to have a five-year interval. I thought I remembered posting the PDFs a while ago, but apparently my memory befoozled me. (Well, the past few years have been … complicated.)
Okay, so I’ve uploaded them now. Thus if you’re one of those penurious souls who never purchased the hard copy, you can now read the articles for free! Check out Jason Lee Byas defending market anarchism vis-à-vis communist anarchism; Joseph R. Stromberg defending Gabriel Kolko’s account of the role of big business in setting up the regulatory state; Thomas Lafayette Bateman III and Walter E. Block on the political implications of the free will debate; an exchange between Jan Narveson and James P. Sterba over whether a commitment to welfare rights follows from libertarian premises; and an exchange among Gus diZerega, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and your humble correspondent on the merits and demerits of libertarianism in general and Ayn Rand in particular.
All this Molinari goodness is available via this link.
By the way, the 3rd issue (which will feature, inter alia, a reply to Stromberg from Robert Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, along with Stromberg’s counter-reply) has been nearly ready to go for a while now; I just haven’t found the time to put the damn thing together. Maybe this summer? (It’d be nice if the 3rd installment of the Molinari Review could appear before the still-longer-awaited 3rd volume of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, due out this fall. People have been waiting for that sucker since 1973.)
Anarchy, Democracy, and Privacy
A trio of announcements on, yes, anarchy, democracy, and privacy:
(1) PoT’s Roderick Long has a review in Reason of Jesse Spafford’s new book, Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (Cambridge, 2023). Despite his reservations with some of Spafford’s arguments, Roderick says,
…this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously.
Judging from the review, I’m inclined to think that Spafford’s discussion of the Lockean Proviso is worth further discussion. I’m hoping we can have some of that here, possibly with Spafford’s input. Continue reading
Where Ignorant Armies
I was once parodied on a YouTube video (by whom I don’t recall) as holding that “people who are right and people who are wrong are basically saying the same thing.” While I obviously wouldn’t endorse the claim in the form stated, the line does insightfully capture something about my approach – a suspicion of stark oppositions. Suspicion, not invariable rejection: sometimes one side of an opposition is just completely and uninterestingly wrong. But I’m regularly finding my way to angles from which supposedly stark oppositions can be seen as complicated or subverted by unexpected affinities – which is why, e.g., I was never fully satisfied, even at the height of my Randian period, with the cops-and-robbers approach to intellectual history that prevails in Randian (and not only Randian) circles, consigning all of e.g. Plato’s or Augustine’s or Hume’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Heidegger’s or Rawls’s writings to the Dustbin of Total and Irredeemable Worthlessness, rather than approaching them with the expectation that they might have something valuable to teach.
Hence my tendency to question such oppositions as libertarianism versus social justice, analytic versus continental, social anarchism versus anarcho-capitalism, deontology versus teleology, eastern versus western thought, theism versus atheism, Hayekianism versus Rothbardianism, and most recently, Randian discipline versus Kerouacian spontaneity. (And no, it’s not a rejection of the law of non-contradiction to question whether positions presented as mutually contradictory really are so.)
One of the most important pieces of advice I would give to young scholars beginning their intellectual journeys is not to structure their conceptual landscape so as to close themselves off from the opportunity to learn from both sides of supposedly unbridgeable gaps.
Policy of Truth 