Category Archives: book review

Stirring the POT (5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, book review, cancel culture, liberty and the left, migrant defense, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, political philosophy, slices of life

Politics and the Problematics of Fun

I started my “Stirring the POT” series earlier this year as a vehicle for announcements, but it gradually morphed into a series of ruminations on conferences I attended. The latter turned out to be the more interesting enterprise, so I’ll close out the year with a belated conference rumination. This past April, I went to San Francisco, at the invitation of Roderick Long and the Molinari Society, to be on an Author-Meets-Critics panel on Gary Chartier’s Christianity and the Nation State. It promised to be a good time, and it was. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (5/6)

Posted on by under book review, Health Care Series, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, political philosophy

4200 words, 25 minutes’ reading time

For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.

5. Pettit on employment-at-will
I said above that I agree in a broad way with Pettit’s critique of employment-at will. Let me put it this way: I agree that employment-at-will, at least as currently practiced in the American labor market, is a highly problematic institution, one that frequently exemplifies domination for just the reasons Pettit gives. But while this may sound like substantial-enough agreement, I think it conceals some subtle but significant disagreement. In this post, I want to work through some of the agreement and the disagreement.

Though Pettit doesn’t put things quite this way, I think we can probably agree that two things make employment-at-will problematic. One is its asymmetric character. The other are the stakes involved when it’s invoked and exercised. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (4/6)

Posted on by under book review, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

2800 words, 15 minutes’ reading time.
For part 1 of this series, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here.

4. Pettit on domination
I started out by saying that I have a conflicted–with any luck, instructively conflicted–view of Pettit’s republicanism, and of its application to employment-at-will. I wish I had a single snappy way of describing my conflict, but I don’t. At one level, I agree in principle with Pettit; at another level, I don’t. At one level, I agree with Pettit’s critique of employment-at-will; at another level, I don’t. Let me work through some of this out loud in the hopes that my tangles are instructive to others. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (3/6)

Posted on by under book review, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

For part 1 of this series, go here. For part 2 of this series, go here.

5300 words, 28 minutes’ reading time
Trigger warnings: broken promises, failed hookups, orgasm gaps, Immanuel Kant, Murray Rothbard, Richard Epstein, employment

3. Contract and liberal interference
Traditionally, liberals have insisted that property and contractual rights—including those rights exercised within a corporate setting–are expressions of freedom, and so, fall within the zone or space to be protected by the State. Buying, selling, paying, loaning, renting, hiring, firing, investing, gifting, donating and so on are all protected on the side of what we might call the economic agent, as are being bought-from, being sold-to, being paid, being loaned-to, being rented-to, being hired, being fired, having someone invest your money, and so on, on the side of what we might call the economic patient. A third party “interferes” here when agent and patient consent to engage in one of the preceding activities, but the third party steps in to intrude on (hence violate) the agreed-upon terms, putting an impediment in the way of one of the party’s satisfaction of the terms. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (2/6)

Posted on by under book review, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

For part 1 of this series, go here.

2. Republicanism and/vs. liberalism
Central to Pettit’s book is a contrast between republicanism and liberalism. The contrast is useful, but complicated by several terminological complexities. In colloquial American parlance, we often contrast the ideology of the Republican Party with that of liberalism, itself associated with the Democratic Party. So it may tempting at first to think that Pettit is defending the former against the latter. In fact, the preceding contrast has almost nothing to do with the way the terminology of “republicanism” and “liberalism” is used in political philosophy, and nothing to do with the topic of Pettit’s book. So set it aside. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (1/6)

Posted on by under book review, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism
  1. Introduction

We’ve been discussing Philip Pettit’s Republicanism in our online discussion group since March of this year. Our July 21 meeting focused on Chapter 5, “Republican Aims and Policies”: “what a state ought to achieve, and what form it ought to assume, in the modern world” (Republicanism, p. 129). Chapter 5 is the first of four in the book that explicitly ties the book’s theoretical claims to political practice, concretizing what would otherwise be a rather abstract set of theses.

I’ve had some conflicted thoughts about Pettit’s republicanism from the beginning of our discussions, crystallized by his account in Chapter 5 of a pet topic of mine, at-will employment. Having recently finished the book, I sat down over the last few weekends to put my thoughts in order. I have no idea whether these thoughts are of general interest, but in any case, I’ve written up a series of five longish blog posts on Republicanism (five excluding this one), and sketched out a bunch of shorter digressions that were originally footnotes but ended up taking on a life of their own. Starting tomorrow, I’ll post the first of the five posts here, followed by one post per week. I haven’t yet written up the digressions, so there’s no telling when (or if) they’ll appear. But they’re digressions, after all. They can wait. So can you. Continue reading →

Markets with and without Limits

Posted on by under book review, ethics, General announcements, libertarianism, liberty and the left, moralism

Some more bragging to compensate for the free-riding modesty of PoT’s bloggers: Roderick Long has an article out on the dispute over markets with and without limits: “The Limits of Anti-Anti-Commodification Arguments: James Stacey Taylor in Markets with Limits versus Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 37:2 (Fall 2023), pp. 1-10. The publication date is given as 2023, but the issue just came out. Continue reading →

“Justice by Means of Democracy”

Posted on by under book announcement, book review, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, political philosophy

Modesty is supposed to be a virtue. Freeriding is an expression of vice. So how could modesty lead to freeriding? Well, suppose you have bloggers so modest that they refuse to advertise their own publications. Then it’s left to me to do it for them.

With that preface: PoT blogger and freerider John Davenport has a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy. First paragraph: Continue reading →

Anarchy, Democracy, and Privacy

Posted on by under anarchism, Big Data, book announcement, book review, General announcements, liberty and the left, Ukraine

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 →

We Haven’t Got Words for the Pain

Posted on by under Art/Literature, book review

This essay contains spoilers throughout about John LeCarré’s novel, The Constant Gardener.

He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
–Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal.”

When I was a young man, my life’s ambition was to join the U.S. Foreign Service and become a diplomat. Chastened by the first Gulf War (1990-91), which I opposed, I thought the better of my ambitions, and decided instead to become a dull but conscientious academic.

During my third and presumably final marriage (2018-2021), my wife Alison and I bought a small townhouse in rural New Jersey with a little garden plot out front. Alison had great hopes for the garden, and often expressed the wish that I would help her cultivate it. To her great sorrow and eventually mine, I never did. I was too busy being a dull but conscientious academic. Continue reading →