Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Classical liberalism without philosophy

In a blog post for the New Republic Alan Wolfe writes: “What my critics call modern liberalism is instead the logical and sociological outcome of classical liberalism.” He further writes in another blog post that “A liberal society, I believe, is one that allows room for free markets, but also allows room for many other [...]

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: [...]

Cold analytical reasoning

In his remarks (PDF) introducing Liberale Vernunft, Sociale Verwirrung, a selection of  essays translated in German, Anthony de Jasay contrasts his approach of critical analysis of modern liberalism with futile attempts to justify a strict liberal alternative by appealing to arbitrary values and emotions. On taking the counter-offensive, I should also like to see it [...]

The eternal quest to fix prices

If there is one single belief that unites most political thinking throughout the history of mankind it is that prices for goods and services cannot simply reflect supply and demand but should be manipulated to  achieve more grandiose goals. Although mankind has gone through numerous cycles of fixing prices, discovering the unintended consequences, and reluctantly [...]

Neo-liberalism’s dead end street blues

The legal scholar Frank van Dun has written an insightful essay in Libertarian Papers about the unfortunate identification of liberalism with utilitarian-pragmatic policy making. His analysis is helpful for explaining why some liberal ideas became popular and others remained ignored.  Van Dun touches upon the heart of the matter when he writes that politicians like [...]

Curing “rights talk” with more “rights talk”

John Gray reviews Dominic Raab’s The Assault on Liberty: What went Wrong with Rights and makes an important observation: Ironically, while he astutely criticizes the rise of a legalistic culture of rights, Raab seems to believe we can extricate ourselves from our present predicament through another exercise in legalism. Yet when much of the British [...]

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