Blogs > Liberty and Power > News from the Front

Aug 8, 2004

News from the Front


by Liberty and Power


[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Q: How many Austrian economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We don't make quantitative predictions.


I've just finished a week of Mises University, lecturing on apriorism, abstraction, and anarchy. It's encouraging to see the hordes of bright, committed, hardcore Austro-libertarian students that come to these conferences; the ruling class has no idea what's about to hit it in a few years.

My JLS article Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism is now online. (And for an earlier but longer draft see here.) I argue that despite the Taoists' good press among libertarians, it was actually the Confucians who were the truest forerunners of libertarianism in ancient China.

I've been reading Tocqueville's and Hugo's memoirs about the 1848 revolution. Their ability to delineate, with a few brief anecdotes and descriptions, the character of the principals on the various sides is devastatingly effective.

I see in the news that the U.S. puppet régime in Iraq has temporarily (?) banned the al-Jazeera network. Apparently those pesky al-Jazeera reporters"have been showing a lot of crimes and criminals on TV," which"transfer[s] a bad picture about Iraq." So this paternal time-out is intended to give those nattering nabobs of negativism"a chance to re-adjust their policy against Iraq."

Um ... Operation Iraqi what again?

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Roderick T. Long - 8/8/2004

> I was curious why you didn't cite
> HG Creel's Confucius & the Chinese
> Way

Haven't read it.

Roderick T. Long - 8/8/2004

> I was struck by your use at one point of the term
> 'anarcho-capitalism' which seems to me like a
> very good description of libertarianism: is this a
> common term that I just haven't come across yet?

It's a common term for the anarchist version of libertarianism. "Market anarchism" and "free-market anarchism" are also used.

> Regarding 'spontaneous order' though, just because
> Daodejing as a text postdates Analects as a text
> doesn't mean that the ideas are necessarily in that
> order; I think the idea predates either of them, as
> the term dao was clearly in widespread usage even
> in Confucius' time.

The term "dao" is certainly older than the Daodejing, but that's precisely because the term dao has no SPECIAL connection with Daoism; all the schools of ancient China use the term. (The earliest Daoists didn't call themselves Daoists.) The Daodejing contains what are generally thought to be references to Confucians (the "men of li").

> At some point I need to read more about the
> idea of spontaneous order in libertarianism and
> anarchism, but it always struck me as being more
> of a primitivist fantasy than a realistic expectation.
> That there are systems of meaning and interaction
> that are maintained without apparent coercion does
> not mean that a society without a coercive order will
> remain spontaneously ordered.

Anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with primitivism or the absence of enforceable legal rules. See the links on the Molinari Institute's anarchist resources page:

http://praxeology.net/anarcres.htm

William Marina - 8/8/2004

Dear RL,
Nice article, but when I read both pieces some time ago, I was curious why you didn't cite HG Creel's Confucius & the Chinese Way, also published as Confucius, the Man & the Myth, which made essentially the same point many years ago that you make, but without the constant reference to libertarianism.
Bill Marina

Jonathan Dresner - 8/8/2004

I really enjoyed the article on early Chinese philosophy: I haven't had that much fun reading something about the early thinkers since I gave my students a quote from Deng Xiaoping and asked them which school he belonged to.....

I was struck by your use at one point of the term 'anarcho-capitalism' which seems to me like a very good description of libertarianism: is this a common term that I just haven't come across yet?

Regarding 'spontaneous order' though, just because Daodejing as a text postdates Analects as a text doesn't mean that the ideas are necessarily in that order; I think the idea predates either of them, as the term dao was clearly in widespread usage even in Confucius' time. At some point I need to read more about the idea of spontaneous order in libertarianism and anarchism, but it always struck me as being more of a primitivist fantasy than a realistic expectation. That there are systems of meaning and interaction that are maintained without apparent coercion does not mean that a society without a coercive order will remain spontaneously ordered. At least that's my problem with it.

I was also very struck by your use of Sima Qian as a Confucian thinker, particularly in the area of economics. Though his historiography is very Confucian, his approach was more fact-based (he was an historian, after all) and much less dogmaticly consistent than the others you cite. I'm not sure you're wrong, but I'm not sure you're right, either.

Overall, though, as I said, I really enjoyed it. Frankly, I'm surprised that libertarians held on to Daoists this long, though I suppose the anarchist connection is still strong enough to make it attractive.