Posted on August 25th, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
About two years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays on seminal 20th-century American conservative thinkers. My assignment was Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don” (as Dwight Macdonald called him) known, among other things, for his defiantly populist commitment to majority rule. When Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be ruled [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
Posted on June 2nd, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
An interview with yours truly, at the Campaign for Liberty event in Atlanta earlier this year:
Filed under: Liberty, War
Posted on March 4th, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
Last weekend I got around to reading The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy by Douglass Adair. The book began as his doctoral dissertation in 1943 and went unpublished until 2000, 32 years after Adair took his own life. Not many Ph.D. papers are of wide interest so long after they were written, but Adair’s was [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
My article in the current Young American Revolution mag is now online here; it’s a look at Frank Chodorov, his 50-year project, and the young Right. You can get a subscription to YAR by donating $50 or more to Young Americans for Liberty — a very good cause.
Filed under: Conservatism, Liberty, magazines
Posted on February 24th, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
As I mention below, Ralph Nader is not altogether wrong about what the doctrine of corporate personhood has led to. As Felix Morley explains, abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment to nationalize rights, for corporations as well as individuals, enabled the federal government to extend its powers tremendously, first in the name of laissez faire and [...]
Filed under: Liberty, Philosophy, Politics
Posted on February 9th, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy
Long-time readers of the Tory Anarchist will remember this post from two years back in which I called attention to a colorful anecdote involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand in William F. Buckley Jr.’s memoir of the Goldwater era, Flying High. It sounded almost too scripted to be true, and a reader wondered whether [...]
Filed under: Books, Liberty
Posted on October 4th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
No, but this is what people who connect Hobbes and liberalism have in mind (from de Jasay’s masterpiece, The State): Recalling the regimes of Walpole, Metternich, Melbourne or Louis Philippe (only more so), with a blend of indifference, benign neglect and a liking for amenities and comforts, the capitalist state must have sufficient hauteur not [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
Posted on October 4th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
Very interesting piece on Thomas Hobbes in The Nation, all the more interesting for being a blend of fairly astute political philosophy and a hard-left political agenda. I’ve been intending to read up on the Hobbes literature — in the past few weeks I’ve acquired Hobbes on Civil Association (Oakeshott), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Skinner, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
Posted on September 23rd, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
A liberal columnist for the Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has seen the future, and it’s Ron Paul: Over the past 40 years, the trend among young political activists has been the same: The young Left has fought the older generations of the Right (perhaps because it’s simply more fun), with no thought [...]
Filed under: academia, Liberty, Ron Paul
Posted on July 24th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
I’ve spent a good bit of the last two weeks on the road, or in the air, at FreedomFest in Las Vegas (libertarians, gambling, and semi-legal prostitution — what could go wrong?) and on a short trip to St. Louis. Between those excursions, it was production week for the new issue of TAC, which will [...]
Filed under: Books, Liberty, magazines, Ron Paul
