“You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But…

In a book review of Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (which I confess I haven’t read), Roger McKinney — evidently following Siedentop — trots out the hackneyed claim that individualism is a product solely of the West, and specifically of the post-pagan West. In response to the first claim, I’ll simply point to the many…

According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…

So, libertarians, how many rights do people have? One (say, the right to life, albeit with countless applications)? Three (life, liberty, and property)? Or an unlimited number (the right to do this, that, and the other, ad infinitum)? Because part of any strategy to achieve a fully free society presumably includes persuading nonlibertarians to be…

At the height of anti-NSA furor in January 2014, The New Republic (TNR) published a hit piece on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald that criticized their anti-government beliefs, portraying the leakers as “paranoid libertarians” and traitors to progressive government ideas. Said TNR: By exposing the secrets of the government, they claim to have revealed…

This election cycle’s crop of uninspiring presidential hopefuls, now including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, must be a relief to those favoring mass disillusionment with electoral politics. No candidate, Rand Paul included, represents a convincing alternative to the status quo. Contrast this with the current president, whose appeals to “hope” and “change” convinced many Americans of…

Murray Bookchin. The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy. Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York and London: Verso, 2015). This book is a collection of Bookchin’s essays on libertarian municipalism and communalism, extending from the period when he still considered himself an anarchist until his final post-anarchist phase. In…

In an anti-libertarian rant titled “You’re Not the Boss of Me! Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham,” David Masciotra charges that libertarianism amounts to the petulant selfishness of a child who resents all restrictions on his or her behavior. Masciotra conveniently focuses on libertarians’ saying “you have no right to impose stuff on us,” while…

I keep resolving not to comment on any more of Alternet‘s by-the-numbers anti-libertarian puff pieces, but a recent one from David Masciotra (“You’re Not the Boss of Me: Why Libertarianism is a Childish Sham,” February 26) is in its own category of wretchedness. Masciotra’s commentary includes two seemingly contradictory lines of argument. In the first,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “A University Built by the Invisible Hand” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. In the 12th century, Bologna was a center of intellectual and cultural life. Students came to Bologna from all over Europe to study with prominent scholars. These individual professors were not originally organized into a university;…

We must face the fact that criticism of the libertarian philosophy in the mass media will most likely misrepresent its target, making the commentary essentially worthless. That’s painfully clear from what critics publish almost weekly on self-styled left-wing and progressive websites. How refreshing it would be for someone to set forth the strongest case for…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Grant A. Mincy‘s “Education Beyond Capitalism” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford. To the libertarian, however, education is an expression of individualism. If we imagine education without the state, we are left with self-directed learning, initiative, creativity, co-operative/mutual labor and robust competition between academic institutions. Education is re-imagined as a…

As a libertarian masochist who keeps up with the regular by-the-numbers attacks on libertarianism at Alternet and Salon, I almost dared to hope for something at least marginally better from Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect (“The Libertarian Delusion,” Winter 2015). I was disappointed. “The stubborn appeal of the libertarian idea persists,” Kuttner writes, “despite…

Center for a Stateless Society Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute President Roderick T. Long recently gave a presentation on Left Libertarianism for the Center of Ethics and Public Policy in Duluth, Minnesota. You can follow along with Roderick T. Long and his PowerPoint slides (download): http://praxeology.net/radical-leftist-REV.pptx << Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Ricketson‘s “Radicalism as Revolution: A Call for a Fractal Libertarianism” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. Ruper, in all fairness, does say he appreciates libertarians’ intense self-analysis. He seems to just want libertarians to redirect their energies toward spreading broadly libertarian ideas, rather than converting members of the libertarian movement…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Where are the Specifics?” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Karl Hess, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Charles Johnson‘s “Against All Nations and Borders” read by Ryan Calhoun and edited by Nick Ford. A recent post at the “Libertarian Realist” blog (actually, they are neither) claims to take issue with Sheldon Richman’s defense of free immigration. The post is an example of astonishing sophistry, beginning with a long attack on Sheldon’s…

Objectivist scholar Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom, called for a “dialectical libertarianism.” By dialectical analysis, Sciabarra means to “grasp the nature of a part by viewing it systemically — that is, as an extension of the system within which it is embedded.” Individual parts receive their character from the whole of which…

The week before last, at the International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC), Ron Paul once again misgendered and deadnamed whistleblower and hero, to libertarians everywhere, Chelsea Manning in a speech. Though his words otherwise sounded supportive, they indicate someone who at best hasn’t paid attention to any news pertaining to her. More likely, he and…

With all the hub-bub surrounding the International Students for Liberty Conference, Ron Paul, and “second-wave libertarianism,” I am reminded of a passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity about the “sub-man.” This is quite reflective of any of us who deal with ideologies, but those who specifically follow libertarianism and or anarchism may want…