Welcome Aboard Grinder & Hagel

I am elated to see Walter Grinder and John Hagel join the ranks of Liberty & Power Group Blog, and wanted to personally welcome them aboard. Walter was so instrumental in helping to craft my libertarian education as a young undergraduate—something I will never forget—and I'm sure that my comments here will make both of these gents blush a bit.

But David reminds us correctly of the pioneering work that these two scholars did decades ago on the theory of state capitalism. Their seminal article,"Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision-making and Class Structure," which was published back in 1977 in the very issue of The Journal of Libertarian Studies, remains, for me, one of the most important essays ever written in libertarian social theory. Grinder and Hagel brought together insights from Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Oppenheimer, Nock, and others, exploding the left-right dichotomy and forging a powerful class theory.

Their work was a profound revelation to me back in the 1970s; being bombarded by Marxist theory in college, I remember how enthusiastically I read their essays, published and unpublished, convinced then, as I am today, that it is possible to construct what I ended up characterizing as a"dialectical libertarian" social theory, one that is cognizant of historically specific conditions, while being thoroughly radical in its political implications.

I am proud to be among so many like-minded scholars here, whatever differences of opinion we might manifest (complete agreement, after all, would be so boring). I am prouder still to now have among us two gents whose work continues to inform my perspective till this day. Glad to have you!