Guest Blog by Irfan Khawaja In a recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, “Hang Tough, Israel,” Fernando Tesón takes issue with those of his “libertarian friends” who are “relentless” in their criticisms of Israel, and responds to them by translating a longish passage from Spanish by the Argentinian writer Marcos Aguinis. What follows are four…

It is common in Brazil to say, “Text with no context is pretext.” The wordplay conveys a valuable truth: Out of context reasoning can be easily used as pretext for an agenda. To comprehend reality outside of context can serve interests very different from those originally intended. This should be a wakeup call for the…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “Anarcho-‘Capitalism’ Is Impossible” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “Anarcho-‘Capitalism’ Is Impossible“. $1.50 for the…

As trocas mútuas são o objetivo do Centro em dois sentidos — nós defendemos uma sociedade baseada na cooperação pacífica e voluntária e buscamos estimular o entendimento através do diálogo contínuo. A série Mutual Exchange dará oportunidades para essa troca de ideias sobre questões que importam para os nossos leitores. Um ensaio de abertura, deliberadamente provocador, será…

The debate on thick and thin libertarianism continues, and that’s a good thing. Libertarians can only gain by the discussion. Often one comes to appreciate one’s own philosophy more fully in the crucible of intellectual argument. So I, for one, welcome the debate — so long as it is a real debate and not merely a series…

I continue to have trouble believing that the libertarian philosophy is concerned only with the proper and improper uses of force. According to this view, the philosophy sets out a prohibition on the initiation of force and otherwise has nothing to say about anything else. (Fraud is conceived as an indirect form of force because, say, a deceptive seller…

Scrive la Reuters che quest’anno la corte suprema degli Stati Uniti sarà chiamata a decidere sul più alto numero di casi riguardanti la proprietà intellettuale (PI) di tutta la storia. I giudici sono chiamati a decidere su otto casi: sei riguardano brevetti e due riguardano diritti di copia. Un vero e proprio segno dei tempi….

Download: Destroying the Master’s House With the Master’s Tools: Some Notes on the Libertarian Theory of Ideology Scott argues that the popular religion—or “folk Catholicism”—of Christian Europe, far from serving ruling interests, was practiced and interpreted in ways that often defended peasant property rights, contested large differences in wealth, and even provided something of a millennial ideology with revolutionary import….

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger Foreword Introduction The Failure of Marxism The Marxist Appeal Precursors to Marxist Class Theory Marxist Classes The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory Libertarian Class Analysis Radical Libertarian Class Analysis Agorist Class Theory Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class…

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger Foreword Introduction The Failure of Marxism The Marxist Appeal Precursors to Marxist Class Theory Marxist Classes The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory Libertarian Class Analysis Radical Libertarian Class Analysis Agorist Class Theory Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class…

Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to…

En su reciente exhortación apostólica, el Papa Francisco escribe que «Así como el mandamiento de «no matar» pone un límite claro para asegurar el valor de la vida humana, hoy tenemos que decir «no a una economía de la exclusión y la inequidad»». Y tiene razón — pero no en el sentido que él cree….

I spent a couple of hours this morning scouring the search engines for C4SS “mainstream media pickups” in December. The good news: Usually December is a month that kind of trails off for us in terms of pickups — newspapers tend to run cheery holiday stuff instead of anarchist polemic at this time of year….

Ostrom begins by noting the problem of natural resource depletion—what she calls “common pool resources”—and then goes on to survey three largely complementary (“closely related concepts”) major theories that attempt to explain “the many problems that individuals face when attempting to achieve collective benefits”: Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” the prisoner’s dilemma, and Olson’s “logic…

On October 20th, Amia Srinivasan, proffered four questions for anyone dependent on a technical language of free(d) markets. C4SS Senior Fellow, Charles Johnson, has five answers for her: The Nozickian outlook is often represented as moral common sense. But is it? Here I pose four questions for anyone inclined to accept Nozick’s argument that a just…

The seemingly unbridgeable ideological gap in America between economic libertarians, on the one hand, and on the other, those who advocate various manners and degrees of redistribution of wealth can be rationally resolved through an understanding of the significance of the concepts of property rights and redistributive justice to those who advocated them in 1640’s…

I am told that today is New Zealand’s Father’s Day. I offer this painting by Goya as my opinion of this sort of celebration. To begin with, we should never reverence anything merely for the accident of sheer proximate existence or genetic relation. We should never revere anything on the basis of sex or age….

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…

Libertarianism is, in theory, no defender of the rich and powerful who must always be subject to market competition. As a libertarian who has engaged in countless classroom and online debates, I’ve often asked myself why other people cannot see that. However, I’ve come to understand the reasoning behind the intuitive criticism from the Left…

On a rainy day in May of 1915, the first settlers of the Ferrer Colony of Stelton got off their train from New York and walked about a mile to their new homes. The crowd on its way to the old farmstead included 32 children who would be enrolled in the radical school that anchored…