Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Ayn Rand: Russian fanatic

In some respects, Rand is almost Soviet. Her habit of remaking the past in accordance with her wishes or needs of the present is most striking… Allied to this tendency to remodel the past was Rand’s megalomaniac notion that moral philosophy had been nothing but a tissue of sentimental error until she came along….In her [...]

A satire of the weather

Man the unknown

In a recent review of two new Ayn Rand biographies Daniel J. Flynn makes the following observation:
Ayn Rand’s midcentury novels continue to strike a chord because they read as though culled from today’s headlines. Here, Rand’s “looters” raid government coffers to bail out their poorly performing industries; there, Rand’s “moochers” demand that the “producers” pay [...]

Zinnlandia

A recent blog post by Chip Smith at the Hoover Hog drew my attention to the writer Takuan Seiyo. In the archives of the author at the Brussels Journal I found a 2008 piece on the pathological political culture of the Pacific Northwest, or as the author calls it, Zinnlandia:

Behavioral psychology has names for various [...]

The destruction of self-help by state intervention

The Independent Institute’s quarterly Independent  Review is a worthy publication. The journal produces well researched and innovative scholarly articles in the classical liberal tradition, avoiding excessive emphasis on “public policy libertarianism” on the one hand, and avoiding an exclusive emphasis on a single school of economic thought (such as Austrian Economics) on the other. The [...]

Jonathan Bowden’s Mad

From the publisher who brought us a new and expanded edition of L.A. Rollins’ excellent “The Myth of Natural Rights” comes  a rare little book by Jonathan Bowden called “Mad.” The book was originally published in 1989 but I have not been able to find much information about it. Before publication Nine-Banded Books announced it [...]

A reactionary lady novelist

Before Ayn Rand there was Isabel Paterson.

“Paterson (1886-1961) was a novelist and literary critic. She was slight, just over five feet tall, with a delicate taste in food and drink, a deep love of nature, and a nationally famous sense of humor. Stubborn and sharp-witted, she was also one of the New Deal’s fiercest foes. [...]

John Rawls and the sin of merit

For those who have always suspected a strong religious undertone in the writings of John Rawls, the following piece by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel will come as a revelation. Reflecting on Rawls’s senior thesis “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community” they write:

…the [...]

England in a coma

City Journal reflects on the following statement by Morrissey from a recent interview with the New Musical Express:

Britain’s a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because although I don’t have anything against people from other [...]

Taking Paul Krugman seriously

Robert Higgs on Paul Krugman

Krugman obviously subscribes to the belief, immensely popular inside the beltway, that all the money rightfully belongs to the government, whether it is being considered for involuntary transfer from its private holders to the government or being considered for retention by the people who earned it in the first place. He [...]

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