Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Peter Sloterdijk on the predatory German welfare state

As the United States makes rapid progress to become just another European-style welfare state, one of Germany’s most controversial intellectuals, Peter Sloterdijk, initiates a public debate  with an offensive on the welfare state that takes no prisoners, even by American standards:

To assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it [...]

Libertarian centralism

“Centralization is ordinarily a sign of social decadence.” Russell Kirk
From a “skeptical empiricist” perspective (to use  Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s useful phrase) neither “rationalist”  nor public policy approaches to libertarianism are particularly credible.  But what is quite remarkable about current debates about “libertarian centralism” is that libertarians associated with rationalist schools of thought (Austrian economics, natural [...]

James Burnham on liberalism and decline

James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism proposes the thesis that modern liberalism is the ideology of a society in decline; its doctrines motivate and justify the contraction of Western civilization and reconciles us to it.
In the chapter “Liberalism vs. Reality” Burnham observes that liberals feel uncomfortable [...]

Liberty and oblivion

In 1991 the Libertarian Alliance published an article called “Immortality: Liberty’s Final frontier” (PDF) by David Nicholas. In this article the author argues that “the continuing fact of death renders all talk of liberty ultimately futile.” The author further argues that our concern for the future will diminish as we approach death. But instead of [...]

John Derbyshire’s hard-headed realism

Paul Gottfried reviews John Derbyshire’s latest book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which appears to make a secular, empirical case for “hard-headed realism.”

Although We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism would appear to be a light read, brimful of anecdotal asides, first impressions can and, at least in this case, do deceive. Derbyshire’s work is [...]

Tom Palmer on G.A. Cohen

Unlike some of his libertarian colleagues, Tom Palmer does not have a favorable impression of Cohen’s objectives or his personal ethics.  Analytical marxists like Cohen have contributed a lot to demolish orthodox Marxism but they have never stopped looking for new arguments to support most of the same old conclusions, a practice that seems to [...]

Liberal and religious creationism

The blog OneSTVD [One Standard Devation] has produced a useful table that outlines the similarities between religious creationists and “blank slate” liberals:

These educated, liberal elitists believe their shallow acceptance of evolution distinguishes them from the ignorant “Jesus freaks”. Yet, it is amusing how closely liberal creationism matches the creationism supported by religious fundamentalists.

This chart reminds [...]

Rudolf Carnap politicized

It is a welcome development that there is an increasing interest in the history and substance of logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Most of this literature, however, is produced by professional philosophers and social scientists, and, therefore, should be approached with caution.
Despite the refinements that have been made to the basic tenets of the early [...]

Political classification and economic reductionism

At Taki’s Magazine E. Christian Kopf writes:

As conservatives and right-wingers like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Whittaker Chambers and many others have pointed out for over a century, free marketeers (19th century liberals or modern libertarians) differ from Marxists and democratic socialists (20th century liberals) only superficially, while sharing fundamental traits that range from a commitment [...]

Counter-modernism

In my review of Jonathan Bowden’s book Mad I  discussed the possibility of “a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy, as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism.” Interestingly, Samuel Francis made a related observation in his [...]

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