Written by anarchist scholar Ruth Kinna (professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University and editor of Anarchist Studies) and illustrated by Ralph Harper (most famous for the illustrations in Radical Technology), this book is a collection of essays on ten anarchists that were originally published as stand-alone pamphlets.  The essays — not presented in chronological…

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is a work whose reputation precedes it. Some may love and some may hate it, but most readers of this site, including ones who have not read this book, will likely have some knowledge of its major plot points and the ideological views of its author. Therefore this review…

Bourgeois Dignity‘s line of inquiry — at least as stated — is into the causes of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Fact” — the tenfold or more increase in the average person’s standard of living in a couple centuries’ time. Her thesis that “the Fact” owed its origins to a culture of innovation, of openness…

Fabio Massimo Nicosia, Libertarian Equality, Contradiction, Reconciliation, Maximization. (Amazon.com, 2020) Libertarian Equality, by Italian author Fabio Massimo Nicosia, is a surprising book on left-libertarian political philosophy. It’s not often that left-libertarian thought pops up in Italy, so a brand new book on the topic is a refreshing novelty. In Italy – and probably elsewhere too…

Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creator Zach Weinersmith have collaborated on a non-fiction graphic novel called Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. As the title suggests, it’s a fully-illustrated graphic novel making the case for open borders. Caplan and Weinersmith’s partnership is unexpected, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Caplan’s enthusiasm…

As stated by Ruth Catlow in the Foreword, DisCOs are an alternative to blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO):  Open Distributed Cooperatives. They’re funded by member investments rather than third party capital, and organized around an infrastructure of “interoperable, open-source legal contracts, with a near zero-cost of organisation creation.” DisCOs differ from the predominant model of…

I started this book with some eagerness, expecting to like it, because I’m fond of much of the analysis at Jacobin. The general flavor of the socialist model they promote fits well into the category of libertarian socialism — autonomism, postcapitalism, etc. — that I have an affinity for. And I did like a lot…

Aaron Bastani of Novara Media’s recent book Fully Automated Luxury Communism is the latest entry in the burgeoning postcapitalist genre, which includes Peter Frases’ Four Futures, Paul Masons’ Postcapitalism, and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future. Reading like a Marxist mirror to the pop tech books that one finds at airport bookstores, it’s…

I have a personal rule — I think you should never review a book that you strongly disagree with or strongly agree with. If you entirely agree, then a “review” would be nothing more than an echo. But if you strongly disagree there’s also little point to writing a review, the disagreements cannot be isolated…

I often have difficulty expressing an opinion on the gun rights movement, because my views are so ambivalent. Principled arguments for gun rights based on resistance to unjust authority resonate strongly with me. I’m very aware of the historic association of limitations on gun ownership with issues of social control of the working class, going…

Let me begin by saying that I’m glad this book exists. Phillips and Rozworski are upfront about their book not containing any radical new insights into questions of economic planning, but instead they compile arguments made by others in a highly readable format, something that those on the left who argue for economic planning have…

When it comes to economics, market anarchism has done a pretty good job at punching above its weight. While Austrians and Marxists tend to ignore us, when they do respond it’s with strawmen or lazy assertions of dogma that are easily dispatched. In serious debates in these realms, we hold our own, only falling short…

On the debut episode of his new series “Trigger Warning,” Killer Mike challenges himself to live only on products from black-owned businesses for three days. Michael Render, better known by his stage name Killer Mike (a reference to his lyrical skills, rather than any history of violence) is an Atlanta-based rapper, activist, and media figure….

This article does an excellent job of unpacking the statism that is implicit in nominally “laissez-faire” right-libertarian models of free trade and free markets. By way of background, the main current of what is called “libertarianism” in the United States, and “liberalism” elsewhere, treats the Gilded Age as a satisfactory proxy for the “free market.”…

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the best science-fiction writers working today. Recurring themes in his stories include ecology, archeological exploration, anti-capitalist politics, and the ineluctable passage of time – all of which feature in New York 2140, which, like much of his work (including Icehenge, The Martians, 2312, Galileo’s Dream, and Aurora) fits almost-but-not-quite…

No, no, no. What if we’re not doomed that way? Nick Bostrom is one of my favorite academic philosophers; beyond pairing rigor with audacity, he’s one of the few to grasp and explore the philosophical avenues opened up by modern scientific understanding. But in the last decade Bostrom has shot to some prominence not for…

James C. Scott’s latest book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, is sure to become a classic and a brick in the wall of core anarchist theory. It covers somewhat different but complementary ground to Peter Gelderloo’s Worshiping Power: An Anarchist History Of Early State Formation. I have some significant critiques…

Cory Doctorow (2017). Walkaway. New York: Tor I. The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at…

Grayling, A.C. (2009). Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defense of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values. London: Bloomsbury In his 2009 book, Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defense of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values, British philosopher AC Grayling sets out to do just what the subtitle suggests. He presents a case for civil libertarianism in a…

Radley Balko (2013). “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” New York: PublicAffairs This book was a timely read after the last book I reviewed for C4SS, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall. Tyranny Comes Home gives a “macro” overview of the broader policy implications of U.S. military adventurism, while…