The Three Leviathans Two years ago, at our Spring 1994 Forum on Systems of Law, I suggested that those seeking to build and maintain a Free Nation would face three problems, which I called “the three Leviathans”: “Leviathan Past (that is, the dangers posed by the state presently occupying the territory within which the Free…

In the back of each issue of Liberty magazine is a section titled “Terra Incognita,” which consists of news clippings inane or horrific or both. So I must assume that someone at Liberty found the following item inane or horrific, since it’s the third featured item in the latest (January 2006) issue’s “Terra Incognita”: Port Townsend, Wash. A glimpse into…

One of the quickest and simplest ways to gloss what “Left-Libertarian,” or the “Libertarian Left” part of ALL, means, is just to say that we are for left-wing social ends through libertarian means. This inevitably involves a certain amount of oversimplification — does “through libertarian means” just mean “by getting rid of government controls and letting social outcomes emerge spontaneously,” or does it mean something…

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, has been caught pants down. His tie is not on straight and he begins his speech grasping for straws. “We do live in a dangerous world. We live in a world of terror and terrorism”, he says playing on people’s fear. He references a recent attack on a British…

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore time itself, is against him. Hence, the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run…

All men are created equal. When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of ’76, as later generations would call them—that’s the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty. The…

“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein “Over and over, you’re falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.” — Laurie Anderson I’ve written before about the importance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions for left-libertarians. Here’s another…

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor. You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted…

Carson: Capitalism may have many varieties, types or flavors, but they all have one thing in common – they have nothing to do with a free market.

Knapp: There’s some ideological overlap, but it’s fuzzy. There are some people with one foot in each of the two camps (I used to be one of them; now I’m not), which can be confusing.

Carson: Had the industrial revolution taken place in a genuine free market, our economy today would probably be far closer to the vision of Lewis Mumford than that of Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Chandler.

Gary Chartier: Consider the characteristic Hobbesian argument for the state…

Roderick T. Long: Even in what might seem his least Humean moment – his anarchism – Godwin draws more decisively on Hume than on Rousseau.

Kevin Carson: The large firm and the factory system did not become the dominant economic institutions because of some objective technological imperative, or their superior efficiency in a free market. They became the dominant economic institutions because of their superior effectiveness at controlling labor; and then the state intervened in the market to make them efficient enough to survive.

The question whether people in a stateless society could respond satisfactorily to a disaster like the BP oil spill is really just a special case of the general question whether people without the state can do the things people attempt to do through the state. It seems to me that the answer is “yes.” That’s…

Darian Worden examines Thoreau’s libertarian philosophy and the connections he made between nature and freedom.

It is the responsibility of libertarians to once again pick up the banner of true radicalism, of the anti-draft, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, and anti-feudal movements.

Consent is always compromised by force; the mere existence of effective force dedicated to some end constitutes coercion toward that end, whatever you may think or want.

Roderick T. Long: The libertarian struggle against statist oppression needs to be integrated (or re-integrated) with traditionally left-wing struggles against various sorts of non-state oppression.

Charles Johnson: If libertarianism needs to slim down, which specific varieties of thickness does it need to avoid—and what’s the health benefit to doing so?