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The always stimulating David Gordon writes in a recent issue of Young American Revolution: Hobbes is certainly right that disorder is undesirable; but the dangers of an unchecked sovereign far exceed the discomforts of the state of nature. Hitler, Stalin, Mao–the historical record teaches an unmistakable lesson. Hobbes had constantly in mind the need to [...]
Filed under: Philosophy
I’ve lately been reading Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, a brief but dazzling book that I highly recommend — it’s the clearest and most persuasive account of the “Straussian” interpretation of liberalism that I’ve come across, with Manent’s Thomistic Catholicism compensating for the more dubious elements of Strauss. A 125-page book that covers Machiavelli, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Philosophy
“David Hume and the Conservative Tradition,” by Donald Livingston, makes a compelling case for the Scotsman as the lodestone of anti-ideological conservatism. It also reminds us that “American” exceptionalism has sources across the Atlantic: Hume was at odds with the Whig establishment of his time, which subscribed to the contract theory of government (a form [...]
Filed under: Ideology, Philosophy
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
There’s a magic box, and every time this wondrous device is used by a well-meaning individual it gives an unemployed American a job or puts a roof over a homeless citizen’s head. The only problem is, every time it’s used the box also causes someone on the other side of the earth to drop dead. [...]
Filed under: Philosophy, Politics
The distributist elements in Red Toryism got me to thinking whether there are hidden distributist or even egalitarian assumptions behind anarcho-capitalism. A basic consideration in classical political philosophy is the relationship between wealth and power. (See my post below on Douglass Adair for some cogitations on the subject from James Madison’s neoclassical mind.) Power is [...]
Filed under: economics, Philosophy
Cornell applied mathematics professor Steven Strogatz takes readers on a pleasant trip to the square root of -1. Elementary stuff, but enjoyable nonetheless. Numbers may be carefully fixed concepts, but their relationship to one another is metaphorical, even when one doesn’t realize that a metaphor is governing thought. The real numbers are part of a [...]
Filed under: Philosophy
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
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
The tail end of last week was a busy time for TAC staff. Thursday, which was also the first day of CPAC, was our print date. I made it to the conclave just long enough to emcee Thomas DiLorenzo’s talk, “Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?”, before hotfooting it back to the office for a [...]
Filed under: Ideology, Philosophy, The Left, War