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 to [...]
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 11th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
Last weekend while browsing the philosophy section of the Georgetown Barnes and Nobles I was startled — and pleased — to see a familiar logo attached to some classic works. Regnery’s Gateway imprint is apparently still alive and doing quality work, putting out editions of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Marx’s Das Kapital and [...]
Filed under: Books, Philosophy
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
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
Posted on July 1st, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
Reading the First Things blog can’t be good for my blood pressure. Jody Bottum’s colleague and sparring partner R.R. Reno turns out to be a localist who embraces Bottum’s misconstruction of localism — he, as much as Bottum, believes localism is ethnic:
A fully orbed life of virtue is necessarily ethnocentric. A modern conservative intellectual must [...]
Filed under: Philosophy
Posted on July 1st, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
First Things editor Jody Bottum finds racism and Jew-hatred incipient in the politics of place (”…it’s always the Jews, isn’t it? Or the blacks, or the foreigners, or the diseased”), on the theory that place implies difference and difference means disharmony:
So what is this problem at the root of localism? Part of it involves the [...]
Filed under: Philosophy
Posted on March 21st, 2008 by Daniel McCarthy
Jeff Taylor (not to be confused with Jeff A. Taylor, or other Jeff Taylors) is one of the most interesting Jeffersonian-minded political scientists/philosophers around. His review of Joel Johnson’s Beyond Practical Virtue: A Defense of Liberal Democracy Through Literature furnishes some evidence to back up my claim. Johnson’s book pits what Taylor calls “the anti-liberal, [...]
Filed under: Books, Philosophy
Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Daniel McCarthy
I spent last week attending David Gordon’s seminar on political philosophy (from Plato to Rawls, Nozick, and Rothbard) at the Mises Institute. You can hear the lectures on-line here. Not only does Dr. Gordon marvelously integrate material appropriate for both neophytes and those already well-versed in the history of political thought, he also successfully untangles [...]
Filed under: Liberty, Philosophy
Posted on June 7th, 2007 by Daniel McCarthy
My essay on Peter Viereck is now out, in the June 18 issue of The American Conservative. It doesn’t thoroughly address the points Will Hay and Daniel Larison (among others) raised a few months back after I blogged on Viereck, but the piece gives some indication of why I find Viereck valuable, despite his flaws.
The [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Philosophy, magazines
Posted on March 27th, 2007 by Daniel McCarthy
Georgetown government professor Patrick Deneen was one of the speaker’s at last weekend’s “Liberty, Community, and Place in the American Tradition” shindig in Charlottesville. He made a very interesting case, drawing on Leo Strauss, for what he called America’s “alternative” tradition, of which the Anti-Federalists were the prophets. Deneen has a blog and has posted [...]
Filed under: Philosophy, Social criticism
