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!
Continuing the San Diego bookstores series, I chat with Jack Ran of the Groundwork Book Collective, a radical left-wing bookstore on the campus of UCSD. Topics include running a bookstore as an egalitarian collective; participating in wildcat strikes; surviving arson attacks; the dynamics of anarchist/Marxist cooperation; conflicts with the university administration; what campus leftists owe to Donald Trump; and the joys of reading Proudhon, Kevin Carson, and Shawn Wilbur.
If I seem a little sleepy during the video, it’s because I’d gotten very little sleep the night before. I blame capitalism.
In my latest Agoric Café video, I chat with economist Bruce L. Benson about polycentric mercantile law in medieval Europe and among the Plains Indians; whether private law can work outside of small homogeneous communities; causation vs. correlation in the gun control debate; the perils of scissors-and-paste history; the abolition of criminal law; the incentival perversities of the reservation system; the inevitability of the state; and what intellectual debt he owes to the u.s. military.
Do I plan to vote in the upcoming (November 2020) election? If so, for whom, and why? Or if not, then why not? If these questions have been keeping you anxiously awake at night, answers are gloriously at hand!
It’s time for a jihad against Facebook. My friend Chris Sciabarra explains why. Just to be clear, Sciabarra is not calling for a jihad on Facebook; I am. But the time has come, O believers, to bring the wrath of Allah (subhana w’tala) on this social media platform of Satan. Continue reading
I now have a YouTube channel! The first two videos are up:
The long-awaited second issue of the Molinari Review (the Molinari Institute’s interdisciplinary, open-access, libertarian academic journal) is here! Nearly twice the length of the first issue!
You can order a paper copy from Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, or, I believe, any of the other regional incarnations of Amazon.
(A Kindle copy should be available later this month. In the meantime, the previous issue is available as a free PDF download here.)
So what’s in the new issue? Here’s a rundown: Continue reading
The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, 8-11 January 2020. Here’s the schedule info:
Molinari Society symposium:
New Work in Libertarian and Anarchist Thought
G5E. Thursday, 9 January 2020, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Philadelphia 201 Hotel, 201 N. 17th St., Philadelphia PA 19103, room TBA.
chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
presenters:
Zachary Woodman (Western Michigan University), “The Implications of Philosophical Anarchism for National Identity”
Jason Lee Byas (University of Michigan), “What Is Violence?”
William Nava (New York University), “The Causal Case Against Contributing to Public Goods”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “Ayn Rand’s ‘New’ (Posthumous) Critique of Anarchism: A Counter-Critique”
A good thing just arrived by mail – a first edition of Francis Dashwood Tandy’s 1896 free-market anarchist classic Voluntary Socialism, autographed by the author. And for only $25! Usually those go for over $400, even if not autographed. I’ve grossly exploited some online bookseller, and I’m fine with that.
A long-awaited anthology I’m scheduled to appear in (with a couple of pieces on the question “Do We Need Government?”) has now, I hear, been split into two – one volume on metaphysics and epistemology, and the other on ethics, æsthetics, and politics – and in that form (and with a bunch of historical selections deleted) is/are finally slouching toward publication; see the tables of contents here and here. Some old friends are in it/them too, as you’ll see (if you know who my old friends are).
I’m told: “The eText will be coming out in February [2020], with hard copies soon to follow.”
Policy of Truth 