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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 The book began as his doctoral dissertation in 1943 and went unpublished until 2000, 32 years after Adair took his own life.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
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
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
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 [...]
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 to [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
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
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 [...]
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 [...]
From Paul Lyons’s American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It:
This class began today with the assignment of the first paper — on fusionism — the handing out of an Ayn Rand selection from The Virtue of Selfishness, and a short discussion of her life and work. Then we began a lively, focused discussion carried over Tuesday [...]
Filed under: Liberty, Philosophy, Ron Paul
John Payne offers some thoughts on the case for secession. This is a popular topic among paleoconservatives and many libertarians — both groups like the decentralist implications of secession. The former (and some of the latter) feel great affinity for the old South, and the libertarians are acutely aware that secession is one of the [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Liberty