ABSTRACTS BIOGRAPHIES ENDORSEMENTS REVIEWS FB DISCUSSION SCHEDULE
ROGER E. BISSELL, CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA, EDWARD W. YOUNKINS, EDS.
THE DIALECTICS OF LIBERTY:
EXPLORING THE CONTEXT OF HUMAN FREEDOM
TABLE OF CONTENTS / ABSTRACTS
This collection of essays explores the ways in which the defense of liberty can be bolstered by use of a dialectical method---that is, a mode of analysis devoted to grasping the full context of philosophical, cultural, and social factors requisite to the sustenance of human freedom. Its strength lies in the variety of disciplines and perspectives represented by contributors who apply explicitly dialectical tools to a classical liberal / libertarian analysis of social and cultural issues. In its conjoining of a dialectical method, typically associated with the socialist left, to a defense of individual liberty, typically associated with the libertarian right, this anthology challenges contemporary attitudes on both ends of the political spectrum. Though this conjunction of dialectics and liberty has been explored before in several works, including a trilogy of books written by one of our coeditors (Chris Matthew Sciabarra), this volume is the first of its kind to bring together accomplished scholars in political science, economics, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, law, history, education, and rhetoric.
Introduction
Roger E.
Bissell, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Edward W. Younkins
Dialectics has evolved over the centuries from a purely intellectual discipline to a mode of social analysis, and while the latter first appeared in Marxist and socialist writings, by the middle of the twentieth century, classical liberals, Austrian economists, and individualists of various stripes had taken a very similar approach. Our essays continue the exploration of ways to defend liberty by use of a dialectical method. Christened by our co-editor, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, as "dialectical libertarianism," this marriage of radical context-keeping with the study of human freedom is represented by nineteen authors from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines.
Part I: Foundations and Systems of Liberty
Chapter 1: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
This essay draws from themes that Sciabarra has developed over a lifetime of
work on dialectical libertarian social theory. In some respects, it follows the
template of "the autobiography of an idea"
and is
basically a summary of his "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy" (consisting of
Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, and Total
Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism), which laid the foundation
for an explicitly 'dialectical libertarian' paradigm, the theme of the current
volume.
Chapter 2: Freedom and
Flourishing: Toward a Synthesis of Traditions and Disciplines
Edward W. Younkins
The author presents a framework for a paradigm of human
freedom and flourishing. By combining and synthesizing elements found in
Aristotelianism, Austrian economics, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, positive
psychology, and other disciplines, he reframes the argument for a free society
into a consistent and systematic, reality-based whole whose explanatory power is
greater than the sum of its parts. He explains that his proposed paradigm is a
vibrant, living framework that will evolve as scholars from a variety of
disciplines and perspectives critique, revise, and extend its ideas by
endeavoring to understand the whole through differential and shifting vantage
points.
Chapter 3: The Unchained
Dialectic and the Renewal of Libertarian Inquiry
John F. Welsh
This chapter examines some of the epistemological and
ontological assumptions of libertarian inquiry and suggests the
reconceptualization of libertarianism as a philosophy of liberation based on a
notion of freedom as self-conscious self-determination. The ideas of immanent
critique and an unchained dialectic are presented as an alternative framework
for understanding the context of human freedom and the limitations of scholarly
inquiry.
Chapter 4: Whence Natural Rights?
Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen
Rasmussen and Den Uyl have labored for several decades on the task of grounding
a viable and plausible political theory on natural rights and related issues.
Their most recent research, sponsored by the Mercatus Institute, includes an
examination of certain libertarian or classical liberal philosophers and
political theorists who take a non-natural rights approach, and an
identification of central issues which divide that camp from theirs and which
they address in their new book, The Realist Turn: Repositioning
Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan). The present
essay discusses the context and a brief summary of this portion of their
research.
Chapter 5: Dialogical Arguments
for Libertarian Rights
Stephan Kinsella
The article provides an overview of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's
discourse or argumentation ethics, which is itself based in part on the
discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, with influences from the
economic and political thought of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard; and the
author's "estoppel" argument for rights, which is influenced by Hoppe's work and
the legal theory of estoppel. Related or similar arguments are also discussed
such as those of Frank Van Dun, Roger Pilon and his mentor Alan Gewirth, Tibor
Machan, and others.
Chapter 6: Dialectical
Psychology: The Road to
Depassement
Robert L. Campbell
Psychology is still largely in the grip of positivism. Dialectical psychology is
a significant alternative. Where the emergence of new knowledge or norms is
concerned, it is indispensable. The work of Jean Piaget serves as our case
study. Piaget started considering what he was doing to be dialectical when
others suggested it to him; over time he explicitly incorporated dialectics into
his theory. Piaget's notion of depassement---a property of more advanced
knowledge that integrates less advanced forms of knowledge and goes beyond
them---is unavoidably dialectical. Any psychological theory capable of providing
support or grounding for liberty needs depassement.
Part II: Government, Economy, and
Culture
Chapter 7: Don Lavoie's Dialectical Liberalism
Nathan Goodman
Don
Lavoie was a classical liberal political economist working in the Austrian
tradition. This essay argues that Lavoie's work is thoroughly dialectical.
Dialectics is the art of keeping things in context. This essay highlights four
dialectical themes in Lavoie's work: 1) a focus on comparative economic systems
that emphasizes the importance of institutional context, 2) an emphasis on
developing a radical and systemic analysis of militarism, 3) an emphasis on the
cultural context of economic action, 4) a normative project of radical
liberalism that takes social context seriously.
Chapter 8: Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Adam Smith declared in 1762: "The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade someone to do so and so as it is for his interest. . . . And in this manner everyone is practicing oratory on others through the whole of his life." Yes. The market is a form of persuasion, sweet talk. The changing of minds by speech accounts in a modern economy for fully a quarter of labor income. Rhetoric strongly parallels the liberal theory of markets and politics.
Chapter 9: Exploring the Interconnections of Politics, Economics, and Culture
Robert Higgs
In this article, derived from three previously published essays, Robert Higgs
explores the interaction between government interference in the economy and
corrupt economic motives in business and private life. He explains how such
government programs and policies are both immoral and economically destructive
to individuals and businesses and, in the end, primarily benefit not the people
but the government.
Chapter 10: Context Matters: Finding a
Home for Labor-Managed Enterprise
David L. Prychitko
Classical liberal and libertarian scholars have given
labor-managed enterprise too little consideration. This chapter focuses on the
case for labor-managed enterprise within different institutional contexts,
namely socialist and market-based. The
author argues that context matters: past failures of labor-managed systems have much
more to do with their socialist features, values, and aspirations, and the
incentive and knowledge problems embedded therein, than with their democratic
organizational feature per se. His goal is modest: to help spark a conversation
among his libertarian colleagues about the viability of labor-managed enterprise
within a market economy, and especially those considering libertarianism within
a dialectical framework.
Chapter 11: The Dialectic of Culture and
Markets in Expanding Family Freedom
Steven Horwitz
This essay focuses on the evolutionary and dialectical
relationship between economic change and changes in the structure of the family.
The economic changes brought on by the advent of capitalism and the Industrial
Revolution led to changes in marriage and the structure of the family that had
major cultural implications. In turn, those changes in marriage and family, and
the cultural norms surrounding them, led to a new round of economic changes,
particularly with respect to women's roles in the marketplace and in the home.
The chapter explores these issues with examples from the nineteenth, twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.
Chapter
12: Up from Oppression: Triumph and Tragedy in the Great American Songbook
Roger E.
Bissell
The groups most responsible for the flourishing of American popular music from
1920 to 1950---Jewish-Americans and African-Americans---both rose up from
oppression, acute and relatively short-lived vs. chronic and extended. Success
for the former was fueled by vigorous implementation of intellectual property
rights coupled with a rather benign monopoly of publishers and writers against
the recording and radio industries, but which turned malignant in the 1940s
prompting a breaking of the monopoly by substituting music from other sources.
The latter group contended with exploitation and class struggle throughout the
period, but then stepped into opportunities opened up in the 1940s by the
fracturing of the popular music market.
Part III: Justice, Liberation, and Rights
Chapter 13: Why Libertarians Should Be
Social Justice Warriors
Roderick T. Long
Libertarians are often hostile to the concept of social
justice, on the grounds that it treats states of affairs as subject to the same
kind of moral evaluation as the actions of individuals, and moreover requires
objectionable government interference with both spontaneous order and individual
rights. In response, drawing on the
left-wing market anarchist tradition, Aristotelean virtue theory, and
dialectical social analysis, it is argued that social justice does pertain to
individuals' actions, and that its concerns are in fact part of the grounding of
libertarian rights, and so no threat to spontaneous order.
Chapter 14: Radical Liberalism and Social
Liberation
Gary Chartier
Liberalism affirms freedom, individuality, and diversity.
Radical liberalism is a return to
liberalism's roots that embraces anarchism and intends to be a comprehensive
doctrine; it represents an attempt to transcend the divide between classical and
modern liberals. This essay makes clear how radical liberalism
works by outlining its understanding
of the liberal harm principle as a limit on the use of force. But liberalism
deeply, and independently, values individuality and diversity. Thus, the essay
seeks to show both (1) how radical liberalism as a political doctrine creates
the space within which social liberation can be achieved and (2) how specific
ethical norms provide further crucial support for social liberation.
Chapter 15: Social Equality and Liberty
Billy Christmas
Social egalitarianism is the view that persons ought to relate to each other as
equals. Insofar as justice regulates the use of force in our interpersonal
relations, a socially egalitarian account of justice will tell us when it is
appropriate for moral equals
to use force against one another. This chapter
argues that socially egalitarian account of justice is coextensive with the
libertarian account---that one only use force in defence of prior force.
Libertarianism is therefore part of a broader set of socially egalitarian
political and social values. Liberty is necessary but insufficient for social
equality.
Chapter 16: Formal vs. Substantive Statism: A Matter of Context (pp. 293-305)
Kevin A. Carson
The prevailing tendency in mainstream libertarianism is to look at particular
proposals for "free market reform" atomistically, based on whether they reduce
formal statism, and without regard to their role in the statism of the overall
system. But to ascertain whether they constitute a net reduction or increase in
statism, we must first examine their function within the greater whole. This
means looking at the class nature of the larger system, the identity of the
forces controlling it, and whether particular measures---regardless of formal
statism---increase or reduce the state-conferred privilege of the ruling class in
real terms.
Chapter 17: The Political Is
Interpersonal:
Jason Lee Byas
This chapter defends the view, commonly associated with
Murray Rothbard, that all aggression must be abolished immediately rather than
gradually. While this "immediatism" is often seen as woefully naive at best and
dangerously utopian at worst, it follows straightforwardly from the normative
continuity libertarians already posit between politics and everyday life. Common
objections become answerable once we attach this normative framework to a
positive social analysis which also treats politics as continuous with the rest
of the social world. This understanding of immediatism diverges from Rothbard's
in being less like a campaign platform and more like principles for
prefigurative politics.
Troy Camplin
While Marx purported to predict the end of private property, the combination of
dialectical materialism, Nietzschean dialectics, and deep evolutionary
psychology actually demonstrate the deep evolutionary roots of private property
in territorial fish. With the emergence of territory, rituals, dances, and
visual displays emerged to simultaneously protect those territories from males
and let in females to breed. These ritual displays are the foundations of what
becomes the arts and religion in humans, meaning the arts, religion, and
property are deeply connected. One can thus argue about what rules regarding
property are best, but not about whether private property can ever be abolished.
It cannot. Index
About the Editors and Contributors