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9 books match the query 'Libertarianism'

cover of Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology

Cyberlibertarianism

The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology

David Golumbia

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia traces how digital evangelism has driven the worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the utopian presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. 

Providing an incisive critique of the push for open access and open-source software and the legal battles over online censorship and net neutrality, Cyberlibertarianism details how the purportedly democratic internet has been employed as an organizing tool for terror and hate groups and political disinformation campaigns. As he unpacks our naively utopian conception of the digital world, Golumbia highlights technology’s role in the advancement of hyperindividualist and antigovernment agendas, demonstrating how Silicon Valley corporations and right-wing economists; antiestablishment figures such as Julian Assange, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Edward Snowden, and Mark Zuckerberg; and seemingly positive voices such as John Perry Barlow, Cory Doctorow, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and Wikipedia all have worked to hamper regulation and weaken legal safeguards against exploitation.

Drawing from a wide range of thought in digital theory, economics, law, and political philosophy as well as detailed research and Golumbia’s own experience as a software developer, Cyberlibertarianism serves as a clarion call to reevaluate the fraught politics of the internet. In the hope of providing a way of working toward a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian future for digital technology, this magisterial work insists that we must first understand the veiled dogmas from which it has been constructed.

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cover of Equal Freedom

Equal Freedom

Stephen Darwall, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

"Egalitarian" and "libertarian" are frequently seen as opposing political labels. These two views and their oppositions are the topic of this collection of important essays by an exceptionally distinguished group of thinkers.This collection of essays can be read as a critique of libertarianism. A libertarian, in contemporary discussion, is one who supports no more than a minimal state--a government that protects individuals from assault, murder, theft, and other invasions of their "Lockean" rights, but otherwise does not interfere with voluntary economic or personal activity. "Egalitarian," on the other hand, generally refers to someone who is prepared to favor such interference if it is necessary to reduce substantial inequalities of certain kinds and if, perhaps, it is democratically authorized.Several of the essays, those of John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, advance different versions of this liberal egalitarian line of argument. Each maintains that the ideas of freedom and equality enter into moral and political philosophy at a more fundamental level than the substantive, rights-determining norms on which libertarianism makes its stand. Each proposes a distinctive vision of this fundamental role. And each argues, on this basis, for egalitarian moral or political principles. Amartya Sen's essay can also be placed within a broadly liberal egalitarian tradition, although it is less an argument for substantive equality (and against libertarianism) than a discussion of what form a reasonable egalitarianism might take. Finally, Quentin Skinner directly criticizes libertarianism in ways that arguably tend to support egalitarianism, although this is not his primary aim.This book offers deep thinking across one of the main fissures of current political debate. It will thus be of interest to all with a serious interest in the fundamentals of political beliefs and action.
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cover of Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition

Illiberal Justice

John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition

David Lewis Schaefer

University of Missouri Press, 2007

Often considered the greatest American political philosopher of the twentieth century, and the most important liberal theorist since John Stuart Mill, John Rawls enjoys a practically sacrosanct status among scholars of political theory, law, and ethics. In Illiberal Justice, David Schaefer offers the most thorough challenge to Rawls’s doctrine yet published, demonstrating how his teachings deviate from the core tradition of constitutional liberalism as exemplified by leading American statesmen from the founders through Lincoln and beyond.
Illiberal Justice is the first comprehensive overview of all of Rawls’s writings, emphasizing the continuity in his thought and intention to a greater extent than other scholars have done. Schaefer offers a fundamental critique of both Rawls’s conception of political philosophy and the policy judgments he derives from his “principles of justice.” Schaefer argues that Rawls’s failure to ground his teaching about justice in a serious analysis of human nature or an empirical grasp of political life is symptomatic of a larger crisis within contemporary liberal political and jurisprudential theorizing.
Although Rawls is commonly viewed as a welfare-state liberal, Schaefer stresses that his writings actually embody a radical transformation of liberalism in the direction of libertarianism that deviates sharply from the American liberal tradition. Citing empirical evidence of the persistence of political and economic opportunity in America, Schaefer challenges Rawls’s allegations that our polity suffers from grave injustices. He points out the strikingly apocalyptic tone of Rawls’s last writings, in which Rawls even questions whether human existence is worthwhile if his principles are not actualized.
Illiberal Justice is not only a critique of Rawls’s political program and philosophic methodology, it is also a defense of the American constitutional order against Rawls’s dogmatic theorizing, which Schaefer argues has exercised an increasing, and detrimental, effect on our jurisprudence. By combining a thorough critical exegesis of Rawls’s texts with a broad engagement with the tradition of political philosophy and American political thought, Schaefer makes an important contribution to both our understanding of Rawls and the enterprise of political philosophy.
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cover of Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment.  Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity.   The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.  

For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent.  The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle.  It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and  Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth.  The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies.  McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones.  Not matter but ideas.  Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich.  At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
 
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cover of Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market

Non-Design

Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market

Anthony Fontenot

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart  of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.
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cover of On Western Terrorism - New Edition: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare

On Western Terrorism - New Edition

From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare

Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek

Pluto Press, 2017

“Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” ― New York Times

“Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon.”—New York Review of Books
 
In On Western Terrorism, world-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses Western power and propaganda with filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. Together they touch on colonialism, propaganda, and the media, and cover topics from the Soviet Union to Latin America to the Arab Spring.
 
Here is the perfect introduction to Chomsky's political thought and provides an accessible approach for anyone who wishes to better understand the West's fraught role in the world.  Admired by some, condemned by others, and feared by all—the military might of the West is undeniably colossal.
 
Beginning with stories of the New York newsstand where Chomsky started his political education as a teenager, the discussion broadens out to encompass colonialism, imperial control, propaganda, and drone warfare.
 
Chomsky and Vltchek offer a powerful critique of the legacy of colonialism, touching upon many countries including Syria, Nicaragua, Cuba, China, Chile, and Turkey. The Table of Contents:
 
1. The Murderous Legacy of Colonialism
2. Concealing the Crimes of the West
3. Propaganda and the Media
4. The Soviet Bloc
5. India and China
6. Latin America
7. The Middle East and the Arab Spring
8. Hope in the Most Devastated Places on Earth
9. The Decline of U.S. Power Timeline
 
With a fresh design and a new foreword by Chomsky, this edition of On Western Terrorism stands as an influential and powerful critique of the West's role in the world, inspiring all who read it to think independently and critically. 
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cover of The Conquistador with His Pants Down: David Ramsay Steele’s Legendary Lost Lectures

The Conquistador with His Pants Down

David Ramsay Steele’s Legendary Lost Lectures

David Ramsay Steele

St. Augustine's Press, 2024

The Conquistador with His Pants Down: David Ramsay Steele’s Legendary Lost Lectures assembles fourteen of the penetrating, provocative presentations by this controversial libertarian speaker and writer.  The targets of Steele’s acerbic and witty criticisms include Scott Adams, Mattias Desmet, Sigmund Freud, Sam Harris, Karl Marx, George Orwell, Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand, and all things conventionally Wokish.  Steele’s heroes encompass Immanuel Kant, Robert Michels, Ludwig von Mises, Dexter Morgan, Karl Popper, and all who, howsoever confusedly, come down on the side of liberty, truth, and unsocial justice.
 
“Why Do We See Lysenko-Type Mass Delusions in Western Democracies?”
 
We’ve learned enough to know that Global Warming Catastrophism and the mass homicide of the Covid “vaccines” are totalitarian insanities. But can Mattias Desmet’s theory fully account for these recurring outbreaks of mass psychosis?
 
“Here’s Why There Can Never Be a Marxist Revolution”
 
There are two irrefutable reasons why genuine Marxism can never succeed.  But failed fake Marxism is a real threat to all of us, especially the working class.
 
“The Five Times George Orwell Changed His Mind”
 
We can best understand George Orwell’s thinking by looking at the five occasions when he underwent a major change in his political outlook.
 
“The Most Evil Man in History”
 
Ayn Rand and her slavish worshipers depict Immanuel Kant as the Fountainhead of Evil. But in point of fact, Kant was a far greater friend of liberty and objective truth than the muddleheaded Miss Rand could ever be.
 
“Sam Harris and How to Spot Dangerous Ideas”
 
Sam Harris made his fame and his fortune by claiming that suicide bombings occur because of what the Quran tells Muslims.  But the truth is that suicide bombings—by Muslims, atheists, and, yes, Christians—occur because they are the most cost-effective means for militarily weak populations to hit back against oppressive foreign occupation.
 
“Dexter the Busy Bee”
 
The serial killer Dexter Morgan confers a huge social benefit by deleting bad guys, illustrating the point made by Dr. Bernard Mandeville, that viciously-motivated behavior may give us a valuable public outcome.
 
“The Conquistador with His Pants Down”
 
Dr. Sigmund Freud, who likened himself to a conquistador, marketed a deceptive story about what his patients had told him.  This false tale has been thoroughly exposed, and the slippery doctor doesn’t come out smelling like a rose.
 
“Dr. Peterson! Clean Up Your Theory!”
 
Jordan Peterson is a teller of stories and of stories about stories. But his stories about stories are provably false, and his interpretations of the stories are no more than Rorschach patterns for his own subjective fantasies.
 
“Is It a Fact that Facts Don’t Matter?”
 
Scott Adams denigrates truth, yet he continually appeals to facts.  And the fact is that truth is a powerful influence in human affairs.
 
“An Inconceivably Humble Defense of the Inconceivably Holy Book”
 
In the year 112,075, humankind has recovered from the latest Ice Age and founded a new religion based on an ancient book. You’ll be surprised what our future descendants make of this charming tale recovered from our time.
 
“Some Second Thoughts on Atheism”
 
The author of Atheism Explained comes back to look again at this messy topic and mop up some of the mess.
 
David Ramsay Steele is the author of The Mystery of Fascism: David Ramsay Steele’s Greatest Hits (2019), Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab (2017), Therapy Breakthrough: Why Some Psychotherapies Work Better than Others (with Michael R. Edelstein and Richard K. Kujoth, 2013), Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy (2008), Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (with Michael R. Edelstein, 1997), and From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation (1992).


Rave Reviews of Dr. Steele’s earlier books:
 
The Mystery of Fascism
 
“From Mussolini to The Matrix, from vegetarianism to mental illness, Steele’s relentless logic jolts us awake.”
 
—Thomas E. Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
 
Orwell Your Orwell
 
“an absolutely dazzling book on Orwell, casting a brilliant new light, not just on Orwell himself, but on the entire intellectual history of our time.”
 
—Yuri Maltsev, editor of Requiem for Marx
 
Therapy Breakthrough
 
“Prepare to embark upon a rollicking yet highly informative journey through the intense world of psychotherapy!”
 
—Debbie Joffe Ellis, author of How to Hug a Porcupine
 
Atheism Explained
 
“Covers essentially all the arguments for and against God, in science, philosophy, and theology, with sympathy for the believer’s views even as they are shown to be untenable,”
 
—Victor J. Stenger, author of God and the Atom
 
Three Minute Therapy
 
“Of all the books that explain REBT in simple, clear, and highly usable form, Three Minute Therapy is one of the very best.”
 
—Albert Ellis, founder of REBT
 
From Marx to Mises
 
“a well written and tightly argued defense of Mises’s position that does much to dispel the ‘mystery’ of the socialist calculation debate.”
 
—Mark Blaug, Economic Journal
 
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cover of The Mystery of Fascism: David Ramsay Steele's Greatest Hits

The Mystery of Fascism

David Ramsay Steele's Greatest Hits

David Ramsay Steele

St. Augustine's Press, 2019

David Ramsay Steele, PhD, is a libertarian writer with a powerful underground reputation for producing caustic, entertaining, knowledgeable, and surprising arguments, often violently at odds with conventional thinking. For the first time, some of Dr. Steele’s “greatest hits” have been brought together in an anthology of provocative essays on a wide range of topics. The essays are divided into two parts, “More Popular than Scholarly” and “More Scholarly than Popular.”

“Scott Adams and the Pinocchio Fallacy,” Steele’s 2018 refutation of the popular claim that we might be living in a “simulated reality,” has been hailed as a totally irresistible debunking of that fallacy as promoted by The Matrix movie and by Scott Adams (among many pundits).

“What Follows from the Non-Existence of Mental Illness?” (2017) preserves the crucial insights of “psychiatric abolitionist” Thomas Szasz, while exposing Szasz’s major misconceptions.

In “The Bigotry of the New Atheism” (2014), Steele, himself an atheist, brings out the intolerant quality of the “New Atheists.” Steele powerfully argues that while “enthusiastic belief systems” may give rise to enormous atrocities, the historical evidence goes against the theory (promoted by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens) that these appalling outcomes are more likely when those belief systems include belief in God.

“Taking the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Seriously” (2003) has been reprinted many times, continues to be viewed online many thousands of times, and like many of Steele’s writings, keeps making converts. It is acknowledged to be the most persuasive brief popular statement of the Lone Nut theory.

“The Mystery of Fascism” (2001), which gives this collection its title, is still continually viewed and cited, for its demonstration that fascism arose directly out of far-left revolutionary Marxism and revolutionary syndicalism. Conventional ideologues of both right and left have been provoked by this highly readable piece to start thinking outside the box.

The earliest piece in this collection, “Alice in Wonderland” (1987) is a devastating critique of the Ayn Rand belief system and the Ayn Rand cult.

“Gambling Is Productive and Rational” (1997), mercilessly strips away the loose thinking which favors intolerance and prohibition of gambling. Steele argues that gambling adds to human well-being and ought to be completely legalized everywhere.

Other topics include the recovered memory witch hunt of the 1990s, the benefits of replacing democratic voting with selection of political positions by lottery, the unexpected results of research into the causes of human happiness, the reasons why Dexter (a TV show sympathetic to a psychotic serial killer) was politically “safe,” why economic growth can go on for ever, why the most popular moral argument against eating meat just doesn’t work, how Hillary Clinton could have won the presidency in 2016, why Friedrich Hayek is wrong about social evolution, the inevitable disappearance of market socialism, Robert Nozick’s muddled thinking about economics, and the proper way to view anti-consensus theories such as the Atkins Diet.

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cover of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

The Politics of Bitcoin

Software as Right-Wing Extremism

David Golumbia

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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