Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

Laissez Faire Books will of course be publishing and selling ebooks and dead-tree books individually. They’re a bit pricey this way, if you ask me.  The way you’ll want to get these books and the added value that LFB has to offer, however, is to sign on to the new business model that promises to return the company to the center of the libertarian movement as a book publisher, seller, and community (with online forums).

Yesterday, on the 19th of April, Jeffrey Tucker and LFB launched the Laissez Faire Club. This is an innovative subscription-based book club that offers a host of members-only benefits for the price of $10 per month, or $120 per year. Members will receive a 20% discount on all LFB products, a new ebook at no extra charge every week (in epub and mobi formats) as well as access to the entire archive of previously distributed ebooks, Tucker’s Take (short video book reviews by Jeffrey Tucker), free reports, live author interviews, a private online community forum shielded from search engines and prying eyes and drive-by trolls, and more now and to come.

That sounds like a good deal to me. I signed up last night for a free trial, which comes with some free content that’s yours to keep even if you choose to cancel your membership before the free trial is up.

In the information age, and in light of the illegitimacy of so-called intellectual property, how do you  make money publishing and selling books? Many are wailing and gnashing their teeth, rending their shirts, and lashing out in fear and lazy greed — unable to let go of their precious, state-supported publishing model, dependent on IP and an oligopoly over the publication and distribution of dead-tree books. The Big Six publishers don’t seem to have a clue. But I think it’s not really that hard to figure out:

You treat your customers right, provide them with valuable content that they’ll want to ensure you’re able to continue providing, and sell them added value built around the books: reasonable prices, great customer service with a personal touch, knowledgeable and engaged staff, early access, extra content like free reports on how to circumvent the state legally or Tucker’s Take, personal engagement with their favorite authors, a private and secure community comprised of fellow lovers of liberty, and so on.

Head on over to Laissez Faire Books to learn more about the new Laissez Faire Club and, if you’re a lover of liberty and books and books about liberty, become a member today.

[Prometheus Unbound & TLS]

For years now, since moving away from Baton Rouge and LSU’s library, I’ve been trying to get my hands on the English translation of De Rege et Regis Institutione (The King and the Education of the King) by the Spanish Scholastic Juan de Mariana.

The book is available for free on Google Books in its original Latin, but my Latin is rather rusty. The English translation by George Albert Moore, however, is much harder to come by, being out of print due to copyright, the perverse academic publishing model of  limited print runs aimed at university libraries for outrageous prices, and lack of sufficient interest to reprint it. I do not see why Google would not have scanned it and put it online too were it not (I assume) still under copyright.

Availability of the Moore translation seems to be largely limited to some university libraries. As an online instructor, I don’t live anywhere near my university’s library. And with two young kids, it’s hard to get out  and hunt down a copy at a nearby university. Occasionally I’ve found it for sale online, but always for outrageous prices. I’ve waited and waited for the price of a copy to come down below $100, so I could talk myself into buying it, but it’s never happened. The cheapest copy on Amazon right now is priced at $275 used.

Why am I so interested in this book? Well, mainly for two reasons: one scholarly, the other pertaining to fiction research. De Rege contains an example of state-of-nature theorizing 50 years older than Hobbes’s Leviathan and a defense of limited, mixed, constitutional government before Locke and Montesquieu. I discuss this in my working paper “On the Origin and Poverty of State-of-Nature Theorizing,” which I’d like to finish it someday. De Rege also belongs to the “mirror for princes” literature.

They are best known in the form of textbooks which directly instruct kings or lesser rulers on certain aspects of rule and behaviour, but in a broader sense, the term is also used to cover histories or literary works aimed at creating images of kings for imitation or avoidance. They were often composed at the accession of a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about to come to power. (Wikipedia)

Machiavelli’s The Prince is a perversion of the mirror-for-princes literature, intentionally turning the literature on its head by teaching a ruler how to acquire and maintain power rather than how to be a good ruler in the moral sense.

The first book of my planned epic science fantasy series will be titled A Mirror for Princes, will feature an example or two of the literature, and will itself be an addition to the literature in the broad sense quoted above. So naturally I want to get a better feel for how this literature is written, what subjects it covers, and so on.

Mariana also defends tyrannicide. So there’s that too.

I finally decided to get my hands on this book by requesting it through InterLibrary Loan (ILL) at my local public library. Now I have hours of slogging work ahead to free The King and the Education of the King from its mortal coil.

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources. In this one, I threw my Voegelinian professor Ellis Sandoz a few bones. I no longer have the original exam questions to which I responded below, so bear with me through the beginning of the essay.

Questions one and three seem strongly related but have a somewhat different focus. Both interest me but I will attempt to focus on the former while nevertheless attempting to answer the latter at least in part, owing to the last element of the first question having to do with the subject of poet philosophers. Hence, I will write a critical essay on the following quotation:

Euripides shows us that our self-creation as political beings is not irreversible. The political, existing by and in nomos, can also cease to hold us. The human being, as a social being, lives suspended between beast and god, defined against both of these self-sufficient creatures by its open and vulnerable nature, the relational character of its most basic concerns. But if being human is a matter of the character of one’s trust and commitment, rather than an immutable matter of natural fact, then the human being is also the being that can most easily cease to be itself — either by moving (Platonically) upwards towards the self-sufficiency of the divine, or by slipping downward towards the self-sufficiency of doggishness.

I will attempt to address this quotation in light of the questions raised and with regard to my own research interests in the possibility of transcending the liberal/communitarian debate with a form of Aristotelian liberalism.

Civilization is susceptible to rigidification and decay on the one hand and disintegration on the other, with the latter usually as a result of the former. The modern state-of-nature theorizing of the Enlightenment-liberal social-contract tradition provides an interesting case study of a philosophical anthropology built upon Enlightenment metaphysics and epistemology, particularly atomism, materialism, mechanism, and hypostatized rationalism and empiricism. In this worldview, man in the state of nature is a beast, the worst of them, Locke’s unrealistically benign version notwithstanding. Ethical and political philosophy built upon these foundations, particularly when ethical language and action is impoverished by a single-minded focus on the proliferation of rights (with the result of trivializing them), is bound to produce impoverished human beings, the sort of atomistic individuals communitarians have accused liberalism of necessarily producing. The heirs of the Enlightenment (even Nietzsche) have sometimes lapsed into holding up this beast as if he were a god to be universally emulated.

On the other hand, communitarians have been just as prone to confuse convention (nomos) with nature (kosmos) and dogmatize or hypostatize a particular set of cultural values and institutions as the Good from which they themselves and others have no natural or conventional right to deviate. Deviation is labeled atomistic individualism, immorality, the mark of the beast. It is overlooked or forgotten that while man’s telos  [end] is eudaimonia [well-being, flourishing] and his telos involves social and political life, this telos does not have one unitary and universal form for everyone and must be freely chosen. Moreover, and in any case, man is not a god possessed of omnipotence, omniscience, and infallibility. The communitarian impulse is always in danger of falling into paternalism and totalitarianism.

Both the atomistic god-beast and the communitarian god-automaton cease to be human. Indeed, are the two really so very different? Both are capable of the most inhuman atrocities.

Freedom or community is a false alternative — for there is another option: freedom in community — but, for the most part, neither side has yet to formulate an adequate conception of it in my estimation. I do not mean to suggest that there is any final solution or utopia that can be reached, however. Human existence in the metaxy — our open and vulnerable … our rational, individual and social nature — make this a tension and a struggle that each of us must face within ourselves and together every day of our lives, and every generation.

Some illustrative examples of this tension in Euripedes’ Hecuba and Aeschylus’ Oresteia are in order.

Hecuba is set after the Trojan war, with the victorious Greek army on its long journey home but stranded for lack of wind for their sails and haunted by the ghost of Achilles demanding a sacrifice. Hecuba, the Trojan queen, and her daughter, Polyxena, have been taken captive by Agamemnon; and Hecuba’s son, Polydorus, had before the war been sent to the safety of a friend’s home, the Thracian king Polymestor. Polymestor tragically takes advantage of Hecuba’s misfortune to slay Polydorus and keep for himself the great wealth that had been sent with Polydorus from Troy for safekeeping. Polymestor chose to break with his moral and traditional responsibilities as host and friend, forsaking convention.

Agamemnon chooses to give up Polyxena as a sacrifice to appease Achilles, acceding to the demands of the soldiers who were instigated by the demagoguery of the wily Odysseus. Here we see the misuse of convention and the tyranny of the community over the individual in the name of the alleged “prudential” necessity of achieving the supposed common good at the expense of an individual’s good. Hecuba unfortunately takes out her revenge against Polymestor on his sons, but in defending the justness of her actions appeals to a higher law and leaves her fate up to reason and her ability to persuade.

Fast forwarding a bit, the Oresteia is set during and after Agamemnon’s return home. The Trojan war was tragically begun ostensibly for honor and to reclaim a wayward or stolen bride (Helen). Agamemnon has been away at war for some ten years and has brought back a mistress, the prophetess Cassandra. In the meantime, his wife has grown estranged and resentful and has taken up with another man who has a familial obligation, or so he perceives, to slay Agamemnon. Agamemnon is slain by his wife and her new lover, who are both in turn slain by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, driven by bloodlust and his own perceived familial obligation for revenge (and, admittedly, at the instigation of Apollo). For the sin of slaying his own mother, Orestes is hounded by the Furies (or his own guilt?) and flees to Athens where Athena presides over a trial in which Orestes is found innocent of wrongdoing and the Furies are appeased with a place in Athenian, democratic society.

While admittedly not ideal examples, the plays Hecuba and Oresteia both movingly portray trajedies that could have been avoided, highlight the dangers of renouncing one’s humanity in favor of either pole of our tensional existence, of renouncing either freedom or community, while at the same time providing a ray of hope that reason, persuasion, and a respect for difference can help us avoid further tragedy by stopping the cycle of violence. And, in the worst case scenario, surely it is more Greek and Christian (and less modern!) to die human rather than by our own actions to live an inhuman life. The nature of human existence is such that neither freedom nor community can ever be completely eradicated from the hearts and minds of men.

With regard to the alleged conflict between poetry and philosophy, and the question of the poet philosopher, I think this conflict is an illusory one and both the poet and the philosopher have value, especially the poet philosopher. Ever since I was twelve years old I have had a deep and abiding fascination with and interest in fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, and comic books. It is my belief that the best of these writers, even of popular fiction, are as good if not better observers and critics of the world than most philosophers and social scientists and at worst it is difficult to tell which is the more pernicious. Indeed, one can argue that the best poets¹ are at least to some degree philosophers. But, if taken separately both poetry and philosophy have value, then surely their combination is all the more valuable. In isolation philosophers have a dreadful tendency to become detached from the world and poets can become lost in the meaningless, trivial, or pernicious dramatization of concretes.

There is no guarantee a poet philosopher will not philosophize and dramatize error, but the combination could help to mitigate the countervailing tendencies and keep, so to speak, one’s philosophical side down to earth and one’s poetic side mindful of the philosophical import of his work. With this in mind and in light of the foregoing, Plato’s Republic appears to me to be a philosophical tragedy, for despite being a poet philosopher, Plato’s ambivalence toward politics and poetry perhaps led him to too single-minded a focus on the transcendent and a detachment from the immanent. Plato’s philosopher tragically removes himself from the polis for want of a realistic standard for political and social action.²

Endnotes

1. I’m using “poetry” very broadly here to mean artist, particularly those who craft their art in words, including prose and what we today consider poetry.
2. See, e.g., Claes G. Ryn, “The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism,” Humanitas, Volume XII, No. 2, 1999.

Atoms form bonds of varying strengths with other atoms to form molecules. The bonds they form naturally are generally stable, whereas the ones that are forced by men decay rapidly — and give you cancer.

(Embrace it! Own it! )

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard; HT fellow TLS blogger Robert Wicks for suggesting the second sentence.]

I just had an article published in Libertarian Papers:

“Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia,” Libertarian Papers 3, 16 (2011).

Here’s the abstract:

This paper builds on the burgeoning tradition of Aristotelian liberalism. It identifies and critiques a fundamental inequality inherent in the nature of the state and, in particular, the liberal representative-democratic state: namely, an institutionalized inequality in authority. The analysis draws on and synthesizes disparate philosophical and political traditions: Aristotle’s virtue ethics and politics, Locke’s natural rights and idea of equality in authority in the state of nature (sans state of nature), the New Left’s conception of participatory democracy (particularly as described in a number of under-utilized essays by Murray Rothbard and Don Lavoie), and philosophical anarchism. The deleterious consequences of this fundamental institutionalized inequality are explored, including on social justice and economic progress, on individual autonomy, on direct and meaningful civic and political participation, and the creation and maintenance of other artificial inequalities as well as the exacerbation of natural inequalities (economic and others). In the process, the paper briefly sketches a neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics and natural individual rights, for which the principle of equal and total liberty for all is of fundamental political importance. And, finally, a non-statist conception of politics is developed, with politics defined as discourse and deliberation between equals (in authority) in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being).

Follow the link above for the pdf and MS Word files as well as discussion of the article on the Libertarian Papers website. You can also download the pdf from my Mises.org Literature archive.

Older versions of this article were presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 and appeared in my doctoral dissertation (May 2009) as chapters six and seven.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources.

In this essay I will address how the American framers conceived of liberty as well as how the Constitution they designed was supposed to secure it and whether it has in fact done so. Stating my conclusions right out, which I will then seek to explain and justify as best I can in the space and time allotted, I think that though the Constitution was a grand and very admirable attempt at securing liberty it was at the outset doomed to failure in the long run in large part due to inner contradictions and inadequate safeguards.

By and large the framers, and the American people in general, conceived of liberty in Lockean and republican terms. Locke’s influence was particularly prevalent owing largely to the influence of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, which popularized and enhanced the popularity of Lockean individual rights arguments. This is not to neglect the importance of republicanism and of Christianity; the framers in particular were steeped in republicanism, and Christianity was indeed a formative influence on the early Americans, particularly through the thousands of fiery political sermons of the day, many of which also employed Lockean rights language (such as Elisha Williams in particular, but also Jonathan Mayhew and John Allen).

However, liberalism and republicanism were in tension from the outset, and Christianity has been employed effectively in support of both sides. On the one hand, the sole justification and purpose of government is the protection of each and every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Consistently applied this means that all morals legislation and economic regulation are unjust and invalid. On the other hand, republicans like Algernon Sidney and John Adams feared that liberty unrestrained will degenerate into license, that virtue ought to be promoted and/or required, and vice discouraged and/or prohibited, with the coercive and legal power of the state; and that republican or civic virtue is necessary and must be somehow enforced and inculcated in the people if liberty and the republic are to be sustained. While some liberals have and continue to deny the virtue of virtue, ethical neutrality or relativism is not an inherent feature of liberalism and many liberals do indeed hold and advocate firm moral convictions.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly used Lockean, common law, and republican language. The Constitution itself was an attempt to establish a government that would be responsive to the people, who are the sovereign(s), and limited to securing peace and order by protecting individual rights. It was difficult for the framers to be consistently liberal, however. The three-fifths compromise and related compromises legitimizing slavery in the Constitution came out of the Convention debates. The Anti-Federalists decried the lack of a Bill of Rights, and the Constitution was not ratified until the American people were satisfied that one would indeed be added. The ratification process itself was marred by chicanery and coercion in a number of instances, particularly Pennsylvania. Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion serve as early examples that the state governments and the new national government installed by the Constitution, and those who lead them, left something to be desired in terms of the protection of liberty. From the outset there were attempts to fund public works at the taxpayers’ expense and regulate, tax, or prohibit various sorts of peaceful and voluntary activities.

Ultimately, I think that the Constitution gave the national government too much power. And I must agree with the Anti-Federalists, Thomas Paine, and the preferences of Thomas Jefferson for local democracy, that the United States started off too large territorially to be a constitutionally limited republic, and it continued to grow thereafter. Montesquieu, too, would have objected to a republic of such size, as even Rousseau would have. The fundamental inner contradiction of the state created by the US Constitution, however, and of all modern nation-states generally, is that it claims a territorial monopoly on the legal use of force and of ultimate decision-making. By its very nature then, the state, insofar as it attempts to enforce that monopoly, necessarily contradicts itself by violating the rights of any individuals who dissent. Tacit, implicit, or hypothetical consent cannot be assumed.¹ As one might expect of such a monopoly, both from economic theory and human history, the political elites, plutocrats, and other special interests have never run out of opportunities and “prudential” reasons for expanding government power and extending government intervention at home and abroad.

The principle of separation of powers with checks and balances embodied in the Constitution was an ingenious modern, and very American, innovation and adaptation of the classical mixed republic to the American context. The classical mixed regime attempted to institutionalize competition between social classes as embodied by kingly, aristocratic, and democratic elements of a commonwealth. Lacking royalty and a nobility, and drawing upon distinctions made by Locke and Montesquieu between executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the US Constitution embodies the separation of these three powers more thoroughly than the constitution of England while mixing them somewhat in such a way that each branch would be led to check and balance the ambitions of the others. The arguments for this are laid out in the writings of Publius and John Adams. This constitutional separation of powers can be thought of as an attempt to simulate market competition; however, situated within the fundamentally monopolistic context of a state, this simulated market competition must theoretically and has historically proven to be inadequate to the task. The three national branches and the multiple federalist levels of government (national, state, local) have time and again found it in their interest and the interests of their constituents and political allies to compromise and cooperate in the expansion of government power at the expense of individual liberty.

The writings, speeches, and actions of Abraham Lincoln provide an eloquent illustration of this conflict between liberty and power. The so-called Civil War represents the death-blow of federalism, and only some seventy years after the ratification of the Constitution. While the war had the salutary effect of ending slavery (a reprehensible institution) in the South, this was neither Lincoln’s original intent nor even in the end his primary purpose. The United States is, to my knowledge (and excepting slave rebellions), the only country to end slavery primarily by means of violence and war; and all in the name of saving the Union. After the Civil War, the US government can no longer justifiably be said to rest upon the consent of the people, if it even could before.

From the late nineteenth century onward, Marxism and socialism began to increase in popularity first among the intellectuals and then the poor of America. America’s first (progressive) imperialist war was fought against Spain in the 1890’s under the leadership of McKinley. Progressivism picked up speed in both domestic and foreign policy with the social welfare policies and warfare socialism of Wilson and then FDR. Government social-welfare programs quickly crowded out the fraternal societies and other voluntary social-welfare associations that predominated in America (and England) in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, once glowingly reported on the peculiarly American independence and propensity to spontaneously form voluntary associations for whatever need arose, but that independence and propensity are gradually being eroded by a growing dependency upon the progressive welfare-warfare state. Appeals for a more classical liberal approach to politics by such thinkers as Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), Herbert Spencer (Social Statics), Albert J. Nock (Our Enemy, The State), William Graham Sumner, Randolph Bourne (“War is the Health of the State”) and others have largely gone unheeded. Both major parties and the general populace now support a welfare-warfare state far removed from the constitutionally limited republic with which this country began, merely quibbling over specific matters of policy, focus, and rhetoric.

Endnotes

1. The foregoing should not be taken to preclude the maintenance of social order and protection of liberty by some sort of voluntary government and/or informal order, voluntary law, and polycentric rather than monocentric coercive law (such as some historical examples of customary or common law). The arguments in the foregoing and subsequent paragraph have been made, in whole or in part, by the nineteenth-century American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner as well as by contemporary libertarians Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Roderick Long.

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources.

Some scholars, particularly postmoderns, argue that hermeneutical interpretation is essential to “the so-called social sciences of human beings.” Hermeneutical interpretation originated, to my knowledge, in Biblical exegesis. It has since been extended beyond this sphere, but hermeneutical interpretation is still thought of in terms of the interpretation of texts, although no longer limited to written documents. Hermeneutical interpretation can be applied to our life stories and to oral narratives as well. In hermeneutics there is the tendency to view a text as not having a single fixed meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of a text is not determined solely by authorial intent.

Hermeneutics involves a tripartite or trilateral relationship between the author, the text, and the interpreter. The author and the interpreter each bring their own particular horizon of experience to the text. To be sure, the author presumably has a certain purpose in mind in writing or creating his text and intends for it to have a certain meaning. The author is operating within a particular historical context, however, in which words and sentence structure and such have particular meanings that can change with time. The author’s life has involved formative experiences enmeshed in particular ideas and events that have had at least some influence on him, much of which he may not be consciously aware. The same can be said of the interpreter, whose historical experience and language-use may be vastly different from those of the author. And, moreover, since one cannot have direct and complete access to the author’s mind, interpretation is necessary.

There exist a number of hermeneutical techniques. Perhaps the most general is simply that of the hermeneutical circle. When the interpreter engages the text, he brings with him his horizon of experience, his own world so to speak, and he will inevitably begin to engage the text from this standpoint. As he explores the text, he will gain an overall understanding of its meaning to him and what the author might have meant it to mean, but successive and more careful readings will likely lead to reevaluations and readjustments of that overall understanding which in turn will affect successive readings. Ideally there will be some sort of fusing or integration or broadening of horizons in this hermeneutical process. One must be open to different horizons, however, for interpretation to occur.

One particular type of hermeneutical technique was developed by Leo Strauss. This technique focuses on esoteric writing, or hidden meanings built into the text by the author, beneath the exoteric writing, or superficial meaning, of the text. Strauss argues that esoteric writing is likely to occur in times of great persecution, in which the author would likely be condemned, punished, and suppressed for expressing his views openly. In such cases, the interpreter must examine the text carefully for esoteric meaning. There appears to be some controversy as to whether and how much historical context matters in such interpretation. While there may be some usefulness to this technique – some thinkers may very well have been circumspect in their writing – I do see considerable danger in it (as highlighted by Pocock and others). The technique could be used carelessly, seems to presuppose infallibility, consistency, and genius where it might not be warranted, and could also be used for elitist, secretive purpose.

Another technique is the focus on narrative by Ricoeur, and narrative and tradition by MacIntyre. In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses for us an alternative: Nietzsche or Aristotle. He argues in favor of Aristotle but, being of a post-Enlightenment mindset, seeks to reconstruct or reinterpret Aristotle without his metaphysical baggage. Like other contemporary postmoderns, MacIntyre is wary of metaphysics and foundationalism, viewing them as having failed to satisfactorily ground ethics and politics and as being largely responsible for the totalitarian horrors of the 20^th century.

In place of Aristotelian metaphysics, MacIntyre proposes narrative life stories and tradition as foundations for virtue and politics. He argues that narrative and tradition can provide stability and coherence to our moral lives as well as internal and external validity checks. He thus interprets Aristotelian virtue ethics and the polis in light of these lenses. A life of flourishing would then be largely socially constructed. Proper action could then be judged by ourselves for internal validity in light of our life stories and traditions and externally by others in our community and by other communities.

The excessively communitarian interpretation of Aristotle aside, I’m not convinced that narrative and tradition by themselves can provide a foundation that avoids the problems of infinite regress and vicious circularity on the one hand and the communitarian specters of paternalism and totalitarianism on the other. What seems to be missing in this postmodern sort of approach to narrative and tradition is a conception of universal human nature and a deep appreciation of the value of individuality and individual liberty.

Another postmodern approach that also pays attention to the social and historical dimensions of human existence is that of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s work also evinces a wariness of metaphysical and foundationalist thinking. Wary of modern hypostatizations, Voegelin became focused on actual experiences and the symbols they engender. He warned against hypostatizing either or both of the poles with which human experience is in tension: the immanent and the transcendent. The life of man takes place in the metaxy, the In-Between, between the mortal and the divine. But neither one of these poles should be thought of apart from the experience of tension toward the divine ground of being.

David Corey has recently criticized Voegelin for a tendency to focus excessively on the transcendent at the expense of the immanent; and Voegelin himself seems to admit this in his letter to Schutz (sp?). I think this bias, if I may call it that, in favor of the transcendent, led Voegelin to focus on the apparent Platonic influences or aspects in Aristotle and ignore or overlook Aristotle’s more practical and positive contributions to ethical and political life: namely, Aristotle’s more down-to-earth contributions to virtue ethics, the good life, and practical action in politics.

Jan Patocka’s case bears some similarities to that of Voegelin. He seeks to return to what he conceives of as the true Socratic teaching, a sort of negative Platonism based on Socratic ignorance (or wisdom). He views the metaphysical thinking of Plato and the more Platonic Socrates as objectifying and concretizing, or hypostatizing, the transcendent Idea, which is ineffable and cannot be adequately expressed by rational thought and speech.

I turn, finally, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s interpretive method is genealogical or archaeological. Underlying Nietzsche’s genealogical method is his conception of the will to power, and Nietzsche engages in a genealogy of morality that purports to reveal moral systems of both the master and slave type to be manifestations of the will to power of those who advocate them. Thus, Nietzsche would likely interpret Aristotle’s virtue ethics and political philosophy as a form of master morality. The Athens of Aristotle, after all, was supported by the labor of slaves and valued the aristocratic and intellectual virtues of leisure, contemplation, honor, greatness of soul, and so forth. Aristotle, being one of the well-born himself, simply deemed the traits of his social class – his kind – to be good and, by comparison, those of his social inferiors to be base.

Heidegger, on the other hand, identifies Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians, and his will to power as the last gasp of metaphysics. Cartesian subjectivity has in Nietzsche been reduced to the will to power and cut off from the world in its everydayness. Nietzsche’s overman is a radically free self-creator, and radically inauthentic and impoverished. Heidegger employs two hermeneutical techniques: the hermeneutics of everydayness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of everydayness seeks to disclose Being in man’s everyday experience. The hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to discover and strip away the metaphysical masks that philosophical thought hitherto and the limits of language place on Being. Like Voegelin’s transcendent and Patocka’s Idea, Being for Heidegger is prior to, above, and beyond familiar ontological categories and predicates. Levinas, in turn, criticized Heidegger for privileging ontology over ethics, or one might say at the expense of ethics, which Levinas argues led Heidegger to embrace national socialism, pagan religiosity, and antihumanism.

Ingredients

2 tb EVOO (or canola oil)
2 tsp cumin
1 large onion, chopped coarsely
2-4 jalapenos, seeded and chopped coarsely
6 medium garlic cloves, chopped coarsely
2 lbs. 80/20 ground beef chuck
2 cups red wine (e.g., shiraz, merlot, malbec)
3 tb chili powder (preferably Penzey’s Hot Chili, Chili 3000, or Chili 9000 powder)
1/2 7oz can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped
2 cups finely diced carrots
2 cups beef stock (preferably low-sodium or unsalted)
2 16oz cans of diced, unsalted tomatoes
3 16oz cans of red kidney beans (unseasoned or chili-seasoned)
1 8oz can of tomato sauce (optional, if you want more liquid)
1 6oz can of tomato paste
salt to taste
Fiesta-blend shredded cheese
Sour cream

Recipe

1. Prepare the onions, jalapenos, garlic, and carrots. Thaw beef. Open cans. Etc. Depending on your speed and skill, some of this can be done in between the following steps.
2. Heat the extra virgin olive oil in an 8 quart pot on medium, then cook the cumin in the oil for a minute or so until they start to turn brown and smoke (don’t burn them!).
3. Add onions and sauté until they start to caramelize, then add jalapeno and garlic and saute for a few more minutes.
4. Add thawed ground beef. Break the beef up with a spatula and mix everything together. Cook until meat is browned.
5. I started this step about 25 minutes in from the start of step 2: Add red wine, chili powder, and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Cook down the liquid for about 5 minutes. Note: Adjust jalapeno, garlic, chili powder, and chipotle peppers in adobo quantities depending on your level of wussiness.
6. Add beef stock, tomatoes, beans, tomato sauce and paste. Mix everything together and cook for 30-60 minutes, stirring occasionally, to cook off as much liquid as necessary to reach your desired consistency/thickness. Salt to taste. Note: If you use unseasoned kidney beans, you might need more chili powder and/or chipotle peppers in adobo.
7. Garnish with sour cream and fiesta-blend shredded cheese (optional).

Prep time: 15-30 minutes; cook time: 60-90 minutes.

Serves 8-12, or a few over several days, I guesstimate.

This post is excerpted and adapted from the concluding chapter of my dissertation (so I suppose it might qualify as part of my college essays series), wherein I addressed two related objections to libertarianism in general and to my account of Aristotelian liberalism in particular: utopianism and gnosticism, the latter being sort of a theological version of the former. Does the theory of virtue ethics and natural rights described in my dissertation represent an impossibly high standard of ethical excellence? On a related note, is it foolishly impractical given the current shoddy state of the world? And is the ideal society suggested by my nonstatist conception of politics and severe critique of the state an impossible goal? Even if it is achieved, will it ring in a perfect world of peace, love, and happiness without violence, misfortune, and suffering? Naturally, my short answer to all of these questions is “No.”

First, I wish to answer the charge of gnosticism that might be leveled by followers of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is very popular in certain conservative and communitarian circles, particularly those averse to philosophical systems and principled, as opposed to practical or pragmatic or “realist,” politics.¹ I should know; I studied political science and philosophy at Louisiana State University where Voegelin had been a prominent professor. Indeed, LSU is home to the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies. I was introduced to the work of Voegelin by Professor Ellis Sandoz, a student of Voegelin himself and the director of the institute.

Gnosticism, as Voegelin uses the term, essentially means a “type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. As a religious or quasi-religious movement, gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).” Now, does that sound like it applies to libertarianism, much less Austro-libertarianism? Rather, it makes me think in particular of the constructivist rationalism, criticized incisively by Friedrich Hayek, that arose out of the Enlightenment and pervades various forms of modern statism.

In his political analysis, Voegelin uses the term to refer to a certain kind of mass movement, particularly mass political movements. As examples, he gives “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.”² In his view, the consequences wrought by these movements have been disastrous. With few and only partial qualifications, I do not disagree. What makes them gnostic are certain similar characteristics they share with the original Gnostic religious movement of antiquity. Before listing the main characteristics, it first bears pointing out that even the broad libertarian movement as a whole might not yet qualify as a mass movement. However, as Voegelin points out, “none of the movements cited began as a mass movement; all derived from intellectuals and small groups,”³ so contemporary libertarianism and Aristotelian liberalism are not off the hook yet! With regard to the following list, Voegelin cautions that the six characteristics, “taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.”⁴

1) It must first be pointed out that the Gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Despite Voegelin’s caveat it seems this characteristic does not carry much explanatory power. It would seem more relevant if the dissatisfaction manifests as a form of profound alienation from the world, from the society as a whole in which one lives, or from its government. Certainly liberals and libertarians must feel some alienation, but is it enough to really count significantly toward gnosticism?

2) Not quite so understanding is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to us men (wherever its origin is to be sought) is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. But gnostics are not inclined to discover that human beings in general and they themselves in particular are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.

Voegelin comes dangerously close here to extreme pessimism and fatalism, and to absolving people of their responsibility for not behaving as well as they should and are able. On the other hand, it seems from his description of the gnostic that the gnostic too flirts with, even embraces, absolving people of responsibility: It is not their fault; they could not help it; all the blame rests with flawed institutions and/or deterministic socio-economic and historical forces.

Liberalism, particularly the version of liberalism (or libertarianism) presented in my dissertation, avoids both of these extremes. In order to approach and achieve our ideal, human nature need not be changed. What is necessary is education and a change of institutions. There is a reciprocal causal relationship between people and their institutions; people shape them and are influenced in turn. Institutions present definite behavioral incentives and disincentives. But responsibility for one’s behavior ultimately resides in the individual.

3) The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.

Salvation is certainly too strong a word for what we expect from our ideal society. It would bring greater material and spiritual prosperity, less injustice, i.e., less crime, exploitation, and war. But it will not bring heaven on earth or personal salvation. There will still be crime, some wealth and income inequality (for that is only natural), scarcity, unhappiness, and suffering. It will simply be much better than conditions are now. All the evils that exist in the world are created by human beings, and while these evils cannot all be eradicated entirely, they need not be as great and prevalent are they are and have been.

4) From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered – namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man’s salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.

Perhaps some contemporary classical liberals and libertarians believe there is an inexorable progressive historical process tending toward a final stage of history, but I do not think most do. Indeed, there is nothing guaranteed about achieving our ideal and even should it be achieved there is no guarantee that it will last forever. Human beings and human society being what they are, it is always possible for the necessary traditions and institutions to erode in the minds and hearts of men over the course of generations.

5) With this fifth point we come to the Gnostic trait in the narrower sense – the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.⁵

Classical liberalism and libertarianism in general, and the account presented in my dissertation in particular, do not seek to change the entire order of being. Some things, like the laws of physics and of economics, just cannot be changed by man. The only changes that are sought lie within the realms of personal education and morality as well as social, economic, and political institutions. These are changes that are within the realm of human action. Unlike other political movements, however, the changes and goals of liberalism properly conceived cannot be achieved by aggression, top-down central planning, or sudden and violent cultural revolutions. Rather, they can only be achieved through persuasion, education, the building up of alternative institutions – in short, a far from inevitable process of social evolution driven by purposeful, but not centrally coordinated, human action, the results of which on the macro-level will not be of human design. It will take generations, but “anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”⁶

6) If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescriptions for such change. Knowledge – gnosis – of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. As the sixth feature of the gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the gnostic’s readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.⁷

Even non-gnostic movements have their leaders and their “prophets.” Knowledge is necessary for any human endeavor. This is another feature that does not really add much by itself. Features 2-5 seem to do the bulk of the explanatory work. Taking all six features into consideration together, it seems we can say conclusively that liberalism, particularly Aristotelian liberalism, does not qualify as a gnostic political movement. Aristotelian liberalism is about liberty and human flourishing; it is no more gnostic than Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy.

In answering the hypothetical charge of gnosticism, the charge of utopianism has partially been met as well. The conception of human nature presented in my dissertation is, I think, a realistic one and the ideal society envisioned does not require human nature somehow to be miraculously changed in order for it to be brought about and maintained. The ideal society is not a perfect one in an otherworldly Platonic or Christian sense. It will not bring Heaven on Earth or usher in the End of History. We do not seek to immanentize the eschaton.

I take the moral case to have been made fairly strongly in my dissertation, although the case can always be strengthened by fleshing the arguments out more fully and presenting more than time or space allowed there or in a blogpost. What I did not spend much time addressing in my dissertation is the question of practicality, which raises objections that are variations on the theme “it will never work.” Addressing this question is largely beyond the scope of my dissertation and this blogpost. I must restrict myself to saying a few things.

The moral/practical dichotomy does not sit well within Aristotelian philosophy. As I have argued elsewhere, Aristotelian virtue ethics, unlike most modern ethics, does not recognize a natural tension between what is moral and what is in one’s rational or enlightened self-interest. Immorality is never practical or in one’s rational self-interest in this view, even though a Hobbes or a Machiavelli would counsel otherwise. Moreover, if a critic is not convinced of the practicality, that does not by itself obviate the moral case; arguments need to be presented against the latter as well. This is simply a point about proper argumentation and should not be taken as implying an embrace of a theory/practice dichotomy. It is sometimes said, “Well, it’s good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.” But this is nonsense. If a theory is inapplicable to reality, then it is not a good theory.

The various theories of statism have been making a royal mess of things for centuries now. Perhaps it is time to try something radically different. Ronald Hamowy has observed that “For at least two hundred years [owing to the Scottish Enlightenment], social philosophers have known that association does not need government, that, indeed, government is destructive of association.”⁸ Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith as well as modern thinkers like Austrian economist F.A. Hayek have theorized about and described the emergence of society, culture, law, language, and markets as spontaneous orders. Austrian economists, libertarians, and others have built up a significant body of literature that demonstrates both theoretically and historically that legislative law and state-provided goods and services are inferior to other institutions in civil society: free markets and free enterprises, cultural norms, customary law and polycentric legal systems, and private organizations such as the family, churches, private schools, clubs, fraternal orders, and the like.⁹

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

Endnotes

1. In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin writes: “Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one” (p. 32). It can never be an attempt to understand being at it is? I think Voegelin makes a spurious generalization here. When one reads further, it becomes apparent that he makes this mistake at least in part because he believes in a Christian Beyond that is not amenable to (human) reason.
2. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1968 [2004]) p. 61. See also, Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1952 [1987]).
3. Ibid., p. 62
4. Ibid., p. 64; emphasis mine.
5. Ibid., pp. 64-65.
6. Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (New York: Signet/Penguin Books, 1975; Revised Edition), p. viii.
7. Voegelin (1968 [2004]), p. 65.
8. Ronald Hamowy, The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F.A. Hayek (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005; New Thinking In Political Economy Series), pp. 236-237.
9. See the bibliography of my dissertation and a footnote in the concluding chapter for an extensive list of references. There are too many to convert for this blogpost.

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources.

The cycle of decline from the best regime to the worst is an important aspect of Plato’s Republic, and not merely for the mundane purposes of history and political science. In elaborating the logic of this decline, Plato couples his discussion of the rank order and decline of the five regimes with five corresponding types of man. For this reason it is necessary to understand the philosophical anthropology underlying Plato’s political philosophy as well as the anthropological principle, i.e., that the city is man writ large. Additionally, and perhaps of equal importance as a clue to Plato’s primary purpose in writing the Republic, we are shown (purposefully?) in the discussion of the cycle of decline the utopian nature of Plato’s “city in speech.”

The five regimes in order of best to worst are kingship or aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The corresponding types of man are the kingly or aristocratic man, the timocratic man, the oligarchic man, the democratic man, and the tyrant or tyrannical man. Before delving into the cycle of decline and the natures of these different types of regimes and men, it is necessary to briefly explicate Plato’s philosophical anthropology.

Plato identifies three parts of the ideal polis — the guardians (rulers and auxiliaries) and the general populace — and three corresponding parts of the individual soul: reasoning, spirited, and desiring. Plato also identifies four virtues pertaining to the various parts of the city/soul and the city/soul as a whole, which have come to be known in the classical tradition as the cardinal virtues: wisdom (seemingly sophia for subsequent Platonists and phronesis for Aristotelians), courage, moderation, and justice. Plato argues that a certain group should rule in the city and the reasoning part should rule in the soul; the virtue that pertains specifically to this function of ruling is wisdom, or knowledge of the Good (Agathon). The auxiliaries or soldiers, and the spirited part in the soul, also have a virtue peculiar to them: courage. The general populace of the city and the desiring part of the soul do not have a particular virtue assigned to them, but the virtue of moderation allows all parts of the city/soul to exist in concord and harmony. It is the virtue of justice, however, that makes the virtue of moderation and therefore concord and harmony possible, allows the rulers (rational part) to exercise their (its) wisdom over the other parts, and keeps the courage of the auxiliaries (spirited part) in check. Justice is each part doing and minding its own business. A just city/soul is one in which the part that should rule (the philosopher-king(s)/rational part) does so and the other parts perform their own special functions without attempting to usurp or interfere with the functions of the other parts.

Thus, kingship or aristocracy is the regime in which the philosopher-king or kings rule, and the kingly or aristocratic man is one whose rational part rules his soul, according to the Good. It becomes evident in the beginning of Plato’s discussion of the cycle of decline that the existence of the best regime is dependent on an historical fluke. It depends upon the fortuitous confluence of complex and interdependent historical factors. In order for the best regime to come about a philosopher must gain power of the polis, or a king or aristocracy must become philosophers (or bend his/their ear(s) to a philosopher). Moreover, the conditions must be ripe for the populace to listen to and obey the new philosopher-king and he would nevertheless have to contend with existing traditions and institutions. Moreover, even if the best regime were ever to come about, Plato makes it clear that all things, even the best regime, must inevitably degenerate. This tempts one to speculate that Plato’s Republic is not primarily about the best regime but about justice and the well-ordered soul of a philosopher.

In any case, the discussion of the cycle of decline of regimes and their corresponding types of man is also interesting for more practical political analysis and the philosophical analysis of human psychology. To understand the four imperfect regimes and types of man, it is important to point out that only the best regime and the philosopher are unequivocally oriented toward the Good (or the highest good or summum bonnum). The others are oriented toward a lesser good or, to be more precise, something that might be a good in their proper place in light of the Good if they weren’t made to usurp the place of the Good as the telos of the polis/soul. In the case of a timocracy and the timocratic man, this is honor; of oligarchy and the oligarchic man, wealth; of democracy and the democratic man, freedom; and of tyranny and the tyrannical man, power.

The decline of the best regime begins when the philosopher-kings cease to be identified at a young age correctly and educated properly. Those who would have been better suited to the ranks of the auxiliaries might be given an education and responsibility beyond their abilities or the quality of education of the philosopher kings might deteriorate. The spirited part of the city could become dominant, thus changing the constitution of the city with their love of honor and the value they place on courage and victory in war. In addition to honor, courage, and victory, timocratic man values discipline, manliness, fame and good reputation, etc.

With victory in war comes spoils and with spoils comes wealth. A timocracy can degenerate into an oligarchy as those in power become more enamored with the acquisition of wealth than with honor. The oligarchic man is characterized by his love of wealth and the attendant virtues that make its acquisition more likely (especially in pre-capitalist societies): greed, caution, frugality, discipline, managerial skill, and so forth.

An oligarchy might change to democracy as the son of oligarchic man grows up resenting his father’s single-minded obsession with wealth and all the attendant traits that go along with that obsession. Or he might grow up with an easy life, everything provided for him, but perhaps neglected by his oligarchic father, and possess all the traits necessary for spending his father’s wealth but none of the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining it. The poor, too, are likely to become resentful of their wealthy masters and also lack the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining wealth but nevertheless possess the desire to have it and all the benefits it can bring. Thus can an oligarchy degenerate into a democracy as the democratic man rises to power, either peacefully or violently or through a combination thereof.

Democratic man loves freedom; the desiring part rules his soul yet there is nothing but desire to distinguish which objects of desire to pursue and nothing to keep desire in check. The freedom that initially accompanies democracy makes it a possible home for all types of men, even philosophers, but according to Plato this very unrestrained freedom inevitably degenerates into mob rule and rampant license, a condition ripe for tyrannical man to step in as a demagogue promising order and change. Tyrannical man is the logical conclusion of this decline in the soul as he is completely a slave to his passions and projects his lack of self-mastery or self-control onto the world as a blind need to control others and satisfy his insatiable appetite.