– Friedrich A. Hayek, 1978 | – John Beverley Robinson, 1897 |
12 March 2008
Added to our online library:
The 1849-50 Bastiat-Proudhon Debate and the first five chapters of Dyer Lum’s 1890 Economics of Anarchy. For commentary see here. here, and here.
4 February 2008
The anthology Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, edited by Roderick Long and Tibor Machan, was published this month by Ashgate. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
19 January 2008
Our own Charles Johnson has an article on Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It in the December 2007 Freeman. Isabel Paterson’s 1916 novel The Shadow Riders is available online via Google Books. For commentary on both items, see Roderick Long’s blog posts here and here.
26 December 2007
Added to our online library: Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1907 The Chain Gang, Gertrude Nafe’s 1913 The Law and the Man Who Laughed, and Rose Wilder Lane’s 1919 A Bit of Gray in a Blue Sky. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
15 November 2007
Added to our online library:
Lawrence Phillips’ 1900 review of Edmond Villey’s book on Charles Dunoyer, and Isabel Paterson’s Monkey-gland Economics.
8 November 2007
Added to our online library:
Edmund Burke’s 1748 Editorial on Irish Poverty. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
30 August 2007
The Molinari Society has posted information about its December 2007 symposium.
Molinarians Charles Johnson and Roderick Long will also be presenting papers at the Alabama Philosophical Society’s September 2007 meeting; see abstracts here and
here.
28 July 2007
Added to our online library: F. J. Stimson’s 1888 article Ruskin as a Political Economist and 27 chapters (Preface,
I.,
II.1,
II.2,
II.3,
II.4,
II.5,
II.6,
II.7,
II.8,
II.9,
II.10,
III.1,
III.2,
III.3,
III.4,
III.5,
III.6,
III.7,
III.8,
III.9,
III.10,
III.11,
IV.1,
IV.2,
IV.3,
and
VIII.9) of Benjamin Tucker’s 1893 Instead of A Book.
22 July 2007
Shawn Wilbur has gloriously posted the entire run of Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty here; details here.
27 June 2007
Added to our online library: A 1917 discussion of Icelandic anarchy by Thorstein Veblen. For background, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
24 June 2007
Added to our online library:
Lysander Spooner’s 1884 Second Letter to Thomas F. Bayard. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
20 June 2007
Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Shawn Wilbur, and Wally Conger are scheduled to be interviewed tomorrow; details on Conger’s blog here.
3 March 2007
Happy birthday, Gustave!
21 February 2007
Our own Roderick Long has been elected to the board of Movement for a Democratic Society, Inc.; details here and here.
30 January 2007
We hail the publication of Anarchy and the Law, Ed Stringham’s 700-page anthology of classic Market Anarchist writings. See more information here.
15 January 2007
Charles Johnson’s comments on Matt MacKenzie and Geoff Plauché, from last month’s Molinari Society symposium, are online here and here.
The Molinari Institute offers a new anarchy button; check it out here.
10 December 2006
Added to our online library: Benjamin Tucker’s 1899 speech The Attitude of Anarchism Toward Industrial Combinations.
30 November 2006
Added to our online library: Florence Finch Kelly’s 1916 review of Isabel Paterson’s novel The Shadow Riders. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
10 October 2006
Anarchists launch major media offensive
October 10, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A tiny think tank has set out on a project to provide ongoing news commentary in order to promote their set of views, known as market anarchism.
AUBURN, ALABAMA – October 10, 2006 – Center for a Stateless Society – The Molinari Institute, a market anarchist think tank, today launched a new media effort aiming to put their agenda to abolish government front and center in US political discourse. Dubbing their project the Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org), institute officials laid out plans to publish and distribute news commentary written by anarchists with radically free-market oriented views on economics – taking market anarchism out of the realm of academia and obscure internet blogs in order to put it in the public eye.
Molinari Institute President Roderick Long explained “For too long libertarians, and I mean anarchist libertarians, have treated market anarchism almost as an esoteric doctrine. It’s time to put market anarchism front and center in our educational efforts, time to start making it a familiar and recognizable position. The Center for a Stateless Society aims to bring a market anarchist perspective to the popular press, rather than leaving it confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals.”
Naming longtime radical libertarian activist and freelance web developer Brad Spangler as the first Director of the Center, Long unveiled the Center’s new web site at www.c4ss.org for Molinari Institute supporters and the public.
Said Spangler “I’m honored to accept the post. In anticipation of this moment, we’ve developed a database of thousands of US media outlets for email distribution of content which these publishers will be able to use free of charge. Additionally, the c4ss.org web site makes use of stable, reliable and ‘free as in freedom’ open source web technologies. We’ve developed the site in such a way as to make maximum possible use of social bookmarking services, web syndication feeds and search engine optimization techniques. With this site, we aim to awaken more Americans than ever before to the brutal reality that all governments everywhere are essentially nothing more than murderous bandit gangs – and show them the shining light of hope for a world without the State.”
###
ORGANIZATIONAL SUMMARY
The mission of the Molinari Institute is to promote understanding of the philosophy of Market Anarchism as a sane, consensual alternative to the hypertrophic violence of the State. The Institute takes its name from Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), originator of the theory of Market Anarchism. The Center for a Stateless Society is the Molinari Institute’s new media center.
CONTACT
Brad Spangler
Center for a Stateless Society
media@c4ss.org
http://www.c4ss.org/
1 October 2006
Added to our online library: three more chapters of Francis Tandy’s 1896 Voluntary Socialism. Chapter 6 attempts to reconcile the labour theory of value with the principle of marginal utility. (Followers of the Mutualist/Austrian debate, take note.) Chapters 7 and 8 defend a mutualist approach to money, credit, and banking along the lines of Proudhon, Greene, and Tucker.
25 September 2006
Added to our online library: Benjamin Tucker’s 1892 Why I Am An Anarchist and Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1897 Why I Am An Anarchist. For (minimal) commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
6 September 2006
Added to our online library: Ezra Heywood’s 1863 The War Method of Peace and Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1891 The Philosophy of Selfishness and Metaphysical Ethics. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
1 September 2006
Update your social calendars! The address of Roderick T. Long’s personal blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is changing from praxeology.net/unblog.htm to praxeology.net/blog; and his blog’s RSS feed is likewise changing from praxeology.net/rssfeed.xml to praxeology.net/blog/feed. The new version will be commentable.
3 August 2006
The Molinari Society has posted information about its December 2006 symposium.
21 July 2006
The current version of the Wikipedia entry for Left-libertarianism contains several references to Molinarians Roderick Long and Charles Johnson.
18 July 2006
Jeremy Weiland gave us a nice plug yesterday on his blog Social Memory Complex.
12 July 2006
Added to our online library: James Redford’s essay Jesus Is An Anarchist.
3 July 2006
Added to our online library: Rose Wilder Lane’s 1961 letter to Jasper Crane On Patriotism.
8 June 2006
Added to our online library: Joseph Stromberg’s article English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development from the 1995 Agorist Quarterly. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
16 May 2006
Added to our online library: the first five chapters of Francis Tandy’s Voluntary Socialism (1896). For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
25 March 2006
Added to our online library: Chapters 1, 15, and 19 of Victor Yarros’s 1947 Adventures in the Realm of Ideas, in which Yarros critiques the ideas of his former associate Benjamin Tucker. For commentary, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
In other news, Roderick’s translation of Molinari’s Utopia of Liberty is currently featured on the website of Auburn’s other libertarian institute.
28 February 2006
Added to our online library: Edwin C. Walker’s Communism and Conscience (1904), as well as the remainder of Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Love, Marriage, and Divorce. For commentary see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
24 February 2006
Added to our online library: Friedrich von Wieser’s 1889 Natural Value and
William Smart’s 1891 Introduction to the Theory of Value.
For more information on these two founding classics of the Austrian School, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
20 January 2006
Added to our online library: Robert Collyer’s poem Saxon Grit – not so much for its intrinsic merit, which is not enormous, but because it’s hard to find, and is referred to in another text we’ll be posting soon.
10 January 2006
The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce that later this year we will begin publishing a magazine of radical libertarian political and social analysis titled The Industrial Radical. (“Industrial” in Herbert Spencer’s sense, “Radical” in Chris Sciabarra’s sense.) We hereby invite submissions. (See our submissions guidelines and copyright policy. Also note that The Industrial Radical is a popular magazine, not an academic journal; formal, scholarly articles might be more appropriately submitted to, oh, um, say, the Journal of Libertarian Studies.)
Submissions may be of any length, from a brief paragraph to a lengthy essay; we also welcome a diversity of perspectives, whether you dance to the music of F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Benjamin Tucker, Henry George, or Emma Goldman. Previously published pieces are fine so long as they meet our copyright requirements. We plan to publish themed issues (see theme topics and submission deadlines here), but please don’t refrain from sending us an article just because it doesn’t fit an upcoming theme; the themes are designed to inspire submissions, not discourage them.
Please pass the word, by blogpost or email, to anyone you think might be interested in contributing. (Advance subscriptions are available too!)
7 January 2006
Check out Ben Kilpatrick’s Katrina and Class: A (Missed) Wake-up Call.
2 January 2006
Added to our online library: an anonymous 1887 critique of Molinari’s labour-exchange project, from the anarcho-communist journal Freedom founded by Charlotte M. Wilson and Peter Kropotkin.
In other news, the Molinari Society’s symposium on thick and thin libertarianism last week was a success; see Charles Johnson’s report here.
We are also pleased to see that the anthology Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty has been made available online, with articles by Paul Avrich, Kenneth Gregg, Wendy McElroy, S. E. Parker, Sharon Presley, Charles Shively, Carl Watner, and several others.
Happy New Year to all!
3 December 2005
Added to our online library: Johan Ridenfeldt has kindly sent us some early Swedish encyclopedia entries on Molinari, along with his translations. Check them out here. (We love the description of Molinari as “the law of supply and demand made into man.”)
2 November 2005
Today the Molinari Institute remembers Rosa Parks; see Charles Johnson’s notice here.
In Gustav Landauer’s words, “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Rosa Parks was a priceless pioneer of behaving differently.
1 October 2005
Hear the Molinari Institute President being interviewed by a Molinari Institute Research Fellow!
11 September 2005
Today marks the third anniversary of the Molinari Institute; see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
1 September 2005
Added to our online library: Herbert Spencer’s 1892 Three Letters to Kaneko Kentaro. For discussion see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
16 August 2005
Precise date and time information are now available for the Molinari Symposium in December.
21 July 2005
Added to our online library are three newly translated items: Gustave de Molinari’s The Utopia of Liberty (1848), an early attempt at “libertarian outreach to the left”; the same author’s The Feeding of Paris During the Siege (1871), describing the (predictable, to a libertarian) effects of emergency rationing and price controls; and Yves Guyot’s biographical sketch of Molinari (1912).
For discussion of these three articles see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
11 July 2005
The very first item to be posted in our online library, back in late 2003, was Chapter 20: Patriotism of Herbert Spencer’s 1902 Facts and Comments. Now we’ve posted the Preface and three more chapters: Chapter 24: Imperialism and Slavery, Chapter 25: Re-barbarization, and Chapter 26: Regimentation. For more about these essays, never before available online, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
14 June 2005
Joseph Salerno’s excellent lecture on the French Liberal School (to which Molinari belonged) is now available online, in both audio and video form.
Salerno discusses the School’s history, influence, strategies, successes, and mistakes. Enjoy!
13 June 2005
We observe with pleasure that Liberty Fund continues placing classic libertarian works online, including Jane Marcet’s Notions of Political Economy (1833), Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology (1873) and Political Institutions (1882); and William Graham Sumner’s War and Other Essays (1919).
5 June 2005
Roderick Long recently visited Molinari’s grave in Paris; details here.
21 May 2005
The Molinari Society has posted preliminary information about its December 2005 symposium.
18 April 2005
The Molinari Society has posted a call for abstracts for 2005.
16 March 2005
Roderick Long and Charles Johnson’s Molinari Society essay Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved? is now online.
Some recent online essays have celebrated the birthdays of important libertarian thinkers; see Gary Galles on Gustave de Molinari and Roderick Long on Ayn Rand.
Roderick Long will be speaking at the Austrian Scholars Conference this week.
25 December 2004
Merry Christmas to all! And if you’re in the Boston area this coming Tuesday, don’t miss our symposium on putting the feminism back in libertarian feminism.
24 December 2004
Things have been so hectic lately that we neglected to announce this earlier – but our own Roderick Long is the new editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, founded by Murray Rothbard in 1977. See the announcement here.
Of course this is just another step on our path to World Domination.
10 October 2004
Added to our online library: the introduction and first seven chapters of Love, Marriage, and Divorce, an 1853 debate among Henry James, Sr. (father of the novelist), Horace Greeley (of “go west, young man” fame), and Stephen Pearl Andrews (anarchist, abolitionist, feminist, and free-love advocate). Andrews’ arguments are strikingly relevant to the dispute over same-sex marriage today. More chapters to follow!
Also added: commentary by economist Frédéric Passy (the first libertarian Nobel laureate) and labour activist Hodgson Pratt on Molinari’s 1899 Society of the Future.
2 October 2004
Added to our online library: Roy Childs’ classic 1971 essay Big Business and the Rise of American Statism. Drawing on Austro-Randian methodology and New Left historiography, Childs develops a libertarian interpretation of the Progressive Era, showing that government regulations supposedly designed to curb the power of the big corporations were actually introduced at the instigation and for the benefit of those corporations. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time this excellent specimen of radical libertarian social analysis has been made available online; thanks to Reason magazine for permission to post it!
27 September 2004
We’ve managed to track down a number of contemporary reviews of Molinari’s books. The following book reviews have been added to our online library: J. B. Clark on Natural Laws of Political Economy; J. B. Clark on Economic Morality; J. B. Clark on Fundamental Notions of Political Economy; E. Castelot on Fundamental Notions of Political Economy; E. Castelot on Religion; F. C. Montague on How the Social Question Is to Be Resolved; Thorstein Veblen on Viriculture; Edward Van Dyke Robinson on Greatness and Decline of War; George H. Baker on In Panama; the Political Science Quarterly on Economic Questions on the Agenda;
the Political Science Quarterly on Society of the Future; Liberty’s “S. R.” on Society of the Future; David Kinley on Labour-Exchanges; H. C. Emery on Labour-Exchanges; L. L. Price on Labour-Exchanges; L. L. Price on Précis of Political Economy and of Morals; L. L. Price on Economics of History: A Theory of Evolution; and L. L. Price on Ultima Verba.
From these reviews we learn that Molinari was a hard-headed realist, and that he was a utopian idealist; that he was pessimistic about the past but optimistic about the future, and that he was optimistic about the past but pessimistic about the future; that he favoured regulation of marriage in the interest of eugenics, and that he wanted government out of people’s private lives; that he supported trade unions, and that he opposed them; that he was an orthodox conservative, and that he was an anarchistic radical; that he embraced a purely economic approach with no admixture of moral concern, and that he regarded economic analysis as barren unless supplemented by ethical considerations. Go figure. (As we slowly but surely get Molinari’s works translated and posted, you’ll be able to judge for yourself.)
25 September 2004
Added to our online library: the preface and first chapter, newly translated by Roderick Long, of Molinari’s 1898 book The Greatness and Decline of War. In these earliest sections Molinari traces the institution of war to its origin in primitive cannibalism. More to follow!
24 September 2004
Added to our online library: Grant Allen’s 1894 Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer (Allen’s claim that posterity will rank Spencer “high above” Aristotle, Newton, and Kant raises even our eyebrows – but the billiards story is classic!) and Ljëv Tolstoj’s 1900 antiwar broadside Thou Shalt Not Kill (Tolstoj’s portrait of warmongering heads of state so “perverted and stupefied” by the “servility and flattery of those who surround them” that “without ceasing to do evil, they feel quite assured that they are benefactors to the human race” is all too timely).
11 September 2004
Today marks the second anniversary of the Molinari Institute; see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today. Long’s anarchy lecture is now available in HTML and PDF. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandias and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay Politics have been added to our online library.
12 August 2004
The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce the addition of a new Research Fellow, Daniel D’Amico. Check out his bio page here.
Roderick Long’s August 6th Mises Institute lecture on anarchism is now online.
11 August 2004
The Molinari Society’s first symposium has been scheduled for December 28th, at the Eastern APA in Boston. The topic is “Libertarianism and Feminism.” Details here.
4 August 2004
Good news! The Library of Economics and Liberty has just placed online the entire contents of Joseph Lalor’s massive 1881 Cyclopædia of Political Science, containing (mainly abridged) entries by many 19th-century libertarian writers, particularly the French économistes of the Say school – including Bastiat, Dunoyer, and Molinari. (For more information on the Cyclopædia see Roderick Long’s February 1st blog entry.) It’s a delight to have this libertarian classic available online at last.
26 July 2004
Added to our online library: James Russell Lowell’s antiwar poem Hosea Biglow Conscientiously Objects (1859); Henry Bool’s
Apology for His Jeffersonian Anarchism (1901); and the infamous 1904 Supreme Court case U.S. ex rel. Turner v. Williams. With regard to these last two items, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today, concerning the persecution of anarchists in the wake of the McKinley assassination.
Roderick continues his campaign against the defamers of Herbert Spencer; see his critiques of recent misrepresentations by Spencer-bashers Glen Gibbons and Susan Jacoby.
23 July 2004
Elibron reprints two of Max Stirner’s works (in German): Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) and the harder-to-find Kleinere Schriften und Entgegnungen auf die Kritik (1848).
17 July 2004
The marvelous Elibron now offers facsimile reprints of still more libertarian classics, including William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), Henry Dunning Macleod’s Elements of Political Economy (1858), William Thompson’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness (1869), Richard Cobden’s Political Writings (1867, Volumes One and Two), John Bright’s Speeches (1869) and Public Addresses (1879), Voltairine de Cleyre’s Selected Works (1914), Dyer Lum’s Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists (1887), William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) and Earth-Hunger and Other Essays (1913), Robert Flint’s Socialism (1894), Friedrich Wieser’s Natural Value (1893), William Smart’s
Introduction to the Theory of Value on the Lines of Menger, Wieser, and Böhm-Bawerk (1891), and David Duncan’s Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (1908) – as well as (in French) Destutt de Tracy’s Commentaire sur L’esprit des Lois (1817), Louis Auguste Say’s Considérations sur l’industrie et la législation (1822), Léon Faucher’s Études sur l’Angleterre (1845), Adolphe Thiers’s De la Propriété (1848), Charles Coquelin’s Du crédit et des banques (1848), the Coquelin-Guillaumin Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1853, Volumes One and Two), Frédéric Passy’s Leçons d’Économie politique (1861), Edmond About’s ABC du travailleur (1868), and numerous works by Frédéric Bastiat, Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, Maurice Block, Michel Chevalier, Benjamin Constant, Émile Faguet, Joseph Garnier, François Guizot, Yves Guyot, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Reybaud, Jean-Baptiste Say, Léon Say, Augustin Thierry, Alexis de Tocqueville, A. R. J. Turgot, and Louis Wolowski. (And see below for mentions of Elibron reprints of works by Molinari, Comte, Dunoyer, Spencer, and Tucker.)
This is a great service that Elibron provides – though it’s a pity their books don’t have ISBN numbers.
10 July 2004
Reprints of Charles Dunoyer’s books La Révolution du 24 février and Le Second Empire et une nouvelle restauration – his analyses of France’s turbulent constitutional history from 1848 to 1862 – are available (in French) from Elibron. Dunoyer, a contemporary witness of the events he describes, delineates the effects of collectivist statism with a combination of libertarian logic and righteous wrath.
17 June 2004
Cécile Philippe, Director and founder of our sister organisation, the Institut Économique Molinari in Brussels, recently gave an interesting interview to the Swiss Liberales Institut.
Check it out!
8 June 2004
The eVentura edition of Molinari’s Soirées – “in French ... with index, bibliography, and an introduction by Molinari’s contemporary Yves Guyot,” as mentioned in our 16 September 2003 entry – is now available for online purchase. The Soirées, written in 1849, was the first book to defend Market Anarchism.
Philosophy professor and Molinari Institute director Jennifer McKitrick has just moved from the University of Alabama at Birmingham to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Congratulations to Jennifer on her new job!
4 May 2004
The German website www.mises.de has posted German-language translations of Molinari’s Production of Security and portions of the Soirées.
2 April 2004
Added to our online library: Victoria Woodhull’s famously controversial 1871 address And the Truth Shall Make You Free: A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom, largely ghost-written by individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews.
30 March 2004
Added to our online library: Clara Dixon Davidson’s 1892 article Relations Between Parents and Children (praised by Murray Rothbard
in Power and Market for its “cogent” but “neglected” reformulation of Herbert Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom).
28 March 2004
Added to our online library: two pieces by Voltairine de Cleyre – her 1902 Letter to Senator Hawley (inviting him to shoot her) and her 1912 (?) Direct Action (an essay on strategy which has been read both as a call for violent revolution and as a call for pacifistic non-resistance) – and the Preface and Introduction (with more to follow) to Francis D. Tandy’s 1896 anarchist manifesto Voluntary Socialism: A Sketch, a synthesis of Proudhon, Mill, Spencer, Stirner, Spooner, Tucker, and even (strangely enough for a work that condemns lending at interest) Böhm-Bawerk.
You’ll notice some new photos of de Cleyre. (She described herself as ugly. Go figure.) We’ve also managed to track down photos of Liberty authors Victor Yarros and Sarah E. Holmes.
26 March 2004
The Molinari Institute is, thankfully, not the only organisation working to provide online versions of libertarian classics. Several such works have recently been added to Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty (not to be confused with their other equally marvelous online project, the Library of Economics and Liberty).
Among those of particular interest to students of the radical antistatist tradition are Gustave de Molinari’s 1863 Cours d’Économie Politique (in French), Herbert Spencer’s 1851 Social Statics and 1897 Principles of Ethics, and a collection of essays by Auberon Herbert titled The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.
Kudos to David M. Hart, who’s in charge of the Online Library of Liberty project.
22 March 2004
Our Belgian sister institute, the IEM, has posted Chris Tame’s new Molinari bibliography, in both English and French versions.
Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist classic Instead of a Book, a collection of articles from his periodical Liberty, is back in print, from Elibron.
On his weblog, recently renamed Austro-Athenian Empire, Roderick Long argues for a revival of the 19th-century individualist anarchist approach to feminism.
Lillian Harman’s 1896 report on an “Age of Consent” Symposium was added to our online library some time ago, but we forgot to report it here until now.
11 March 2004
Added to the online library: an anonymous review, from the April 1877 Atlantic Monthly, of Molinari’s Letters on the United States and Canada.
6 March 2004
Added to the online library: a short piece by Henry Appleton, Anarchism, True and False (1884).
23 February 2004
Because Lysander Spooner’s best-known work, No Treason, argues against the North’s right to prevent the South from seceding in the American Civil War, Spooner is sometimes mistaken for a Confederate apologist. That nothing could be farther from the truth is clear from the latest addition to our online library: Spooner’s 1858 Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, a spirited call for slaves and abolitionists to wage a guerilla war against Southern slaveholders.
16 February 2004
The latest installment of Roderick Long’s debate over Market Anarchism with Robert Bidinotto is available here.
14 February 2004
Added to the online library: Mark Twain’s War Prayer (1904-5), written in protest against the Spanish-American War.
9 February 2004
Added to the online library: Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). Wilde wasn’t exactly a Market Anarchist; indeed he seems to have had no particularly clear conception of, or indeed interest in, how economies work. But the considerations his essay raises are ones that Market Anarchists need to take seriously – or so Roderick Long argues in today’s blog entry.
1 February 2004
Added to the online library: Lysander Spooner’s No Treason (1867-70), the classic anarchist deconstruction of social contract theory and state authority; Voltairine de Cleyre’s Sex Slavery (1890), an impassioned defense of free-love advocate Moses Harman; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841), a manifesto of individualism (more in the cultural than in the political sense); and Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur’s Property (1864?), a hard-to-find defense of property rights cited favourably by Rothbard. (For more information about the Wolowski-Levasseur piece, see Roderick T. Long’s blog entry for today.)
26 January 2004
Molinari Research Fellow Charles Johnson’s personal website has changed from www.eskimo.com/~cwj2 to www.radgeek.com.
Check it out!
25 January 2004
More libertarian classics in the online library: We’ve added Lysander Spooner’s Natural Law, or the Science of Justice (1882); Benjamin Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, And Wherein They Differ (1886); and Gertrude B. Kelly’s State Aid to Science (1887). In addition, there’s an anarchist debate on marriage and “the woman question” between Victor Yarros and Sarah Elizabeth Holmes (1888); Voltairine de Cleyre also weighs in on marriage in They Who Marry Do Ill (1908), and offers a stirring defense of individualism in The Dominant Idea (1910). Finally, John C. Calhoun was no libertarian, let alone an anarchist, but his Disquisition on Government (1849) is a goldmine for libertarian anarchist theory.
22 January 2004
Latest additions to the online library: Thoreau’s classic anarchist essay Civil Disobedience (1849); Forced Consent (1873) and Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (1882) by anarchist legal theorist Lysander Spooner; The Economic Tendency of Freethought (1890) and Anarchism and American Traditions (1908) by anarchist feminist Voltairine de Cleyre; and The Conquest of the United States by Spain (1889) by Spencerian sociologist William Graham Sumner (not an anarchist, but he meant well). More to follow!
21 January 2004
Three short pieces have just been added to the online library: The Dinner-Party by American individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews (from his 1852 Science of Society), and two biographical sketches of French individualist anarchist Anselme Bellegarrigue, by Max Nettlau and George Woodcock.
13 January 2004
For some time we’ve been trying to discover the significance of the reference to Rue St.-Lazare (a street in Paris) in the title of Gustave de Molinari’s 1849 Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare: Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (the first book to defend Market Anarchism). Recently we’ve learned, with the gracious assistance of Cécile Philippe and Hervé de Quengo, that both the title and the three-person dialogue format of Molinari’s work were undoubtedly intended as a reference to a posthumously published (1821) work by the authoritarian conservative thinker Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). The work in question is usually called the St. Petersburg Dialogues in English, but its French title is Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence. (For online versions see here and here.) De Maistre is sometimes called “the French Burke,” but in his enthusiasm for warfare and bloodshed he seems even more antiliberal, and certainly creepier, than Burke. Molinari’s own Soirées, in which his Conservative antagonist is made to cite de Maistre several times, can be seen as in part a liberal response to de Maistre’s Soirées. While there may be an as-yet-unidentified reference to some salon or club that really met on the Rue St.-Lazare, the name was most likely chosen mainly to echo de Maistre’s “Saint-Pétersbourg.”
Speaking of de Maistre, we recently came across a page of quotations by him. At the top of the page the website editors have written: “Great quotes to inspire, empower and motivate you to live the life of your dreams and become the person you’ve always wanted to be!” And then the first de Maistre quote is: “In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.” Um ... inspiring? empowering? If that were a fortune cookie we’d send it back.
5 January 2004
The Molinari Society, a “daughter organisation” of the Molinari Institute, has just been approved for affiliation with the American Philosophical Association. This means the Molinari Society will be able to sponsor symposia at the APA’s Eastern Division meetings. The Molinari Society seeks to promote “critical discussion and innovative research in radical libertarian theory,” in the tradition of Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). While the Molinari Institute and the Molinari Society are distinct organisations, it is probable that they will work closely together.
Check out the Molinari Society’s webpage.
18 December 2003
Today we received in the mail Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s new anthology The Myth of National Defense. We were pleased to see that it is dedicated to the memory of Gustave de Molinari, the first theorist to show how defense services could be provided on the free market.
Unfortunately, the dedication page lists Molinari’s dates wrongly, as 1819-1911. In the introduction (p. 9) his dates are listed differently, but still wrongly, as 1818-1912. The correct dates are 1819-1912, as can be confirmed by a look at his tombstone.
10 December 2003
Our sister organization, the Institut Molinari in Brussels, has undergone a slight name change, to the Institut Économique Molinari.
We’ve just revised the format of our online library page to distinguish more clearly between works hosted on our website and works hosted elsewhere.
We’ve also added an anti-copyright page.
On his blog page Roderick Long recently offered a reply to Robert Bidinotto’s critique of Market Anarchism. A further exchange between Bidinotto and Long is forthcoming.
We recently came across a previously unknown sketch of Gustave de Molinari, which appeared in L’opinion publique, Vol. 11, no. 48 (25 novembre 1880), p. 571. View it here.
Elibron now carries Charles Comte’s 1826 classic Traité de Législation (in French). Comte is largely forgotten today (so much so that the Library of Congress classifies one of his works under “Positivism,” evidently confusing him with Auguste Comte) but he was a radical libertarian scholar and activist, and a major influence on Molinari.
Auburn’s other libertarian institute is issuing a Scholar’s Edition of Murray Rothbard’s classic anarcho-economic text Man, Economy, and State. Pre-order it now!
11 November 2003
Excellent news! David M. Hart has once again made available online his invaluable studies Class Analysis, Slavery, and the Industrialist Theory of History: The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer and Gustave de Molinari and the Anti-statist Liberal Tradition – the latter including Hart’s translation of Molinari’s Eleventh Soirée. These pieces are indispensable reading to anyone interested in the history of radical libertarian thought.
In other news, Wirkman Virkkala has uncovered an 1864 review by Lord Acton of Molinari’s 1855 Course of Political Economy (a work which we plan eventually to post in both French and English in our online library). The review, titled Spiritual Economy?, is available here. (The justice or otherwise of Acton’s critique of Molinari will be more easily ascertained once we have posted the text of Molinari’s 1892 book titled Religion.)
20 October 2003
There’s good news and bad news in the world of the Internet.
The bad news is that David Hart’s website, with its wealth of material on the history of classical liberalism – including some excellent material on Gustave de Molinari and an indispensable book-length manuscript on Molinari’s radical colleagues Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer – has lapsed into nonbeing. (The website was at the university where he formerly taught.) Dr. Hart plans eventually to resurrect the website elsewhere; but in the meantime an invaluable resource has been lost to the Market Anarchist community.
The good news is that Mary Ruwart has put the first edition of her book Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle online. Dr. Ruwart’s book offers a clear, New-Age-friendly introduction to the principles of voluntary society. A link has been added to our Market Anarchist resources page.
(The more recent edition, titled Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression, updated to address the issue of terrorism, is available for purchase here.)
13 October 2003
The controversy over Edwin Black’s interpretation of Herbert Spencer continues. See Roderick Long’s reply to Black’s bizarre accusations.
8 October 2003
Yesterday’s issue of Le Monde carried a pair of articles about the Austro-libertarian movement, focusing on Mises, Rothbard, and Auburn’s other libertarian institute. It is startling, and gratifying, to see a major French newspaper writing casually and sympathetically about the Market Anarchist thesis that the “enemy is that entire elite that receives more from the State than it pays to it,” and that “statism, governmental intervention, will perish from its inevitable contradictions, [paving] the way to its eventual abolition.”
Roderick Long has made an English translation of the two articles; the translation has been added to our online library and is available here.
17 September 2003
The errors we mentioned in Hervé de Quengo’s text of the Soirées have been corrected.
16 September 2003
E. L. Godkin’s The Eclipse of Liberalism, a prophetic look at the decline of classical liberalism written in 1900, has just been added to the online library.
We learn that four of Molinari’s works in French – Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare (1849), Lettres sur la Russie (1861), Les clubs rouges pendant le siège de Paris (1871), and Grandeur et décadence de la guerre (1898) – have been republished by Elibron. Elibron also republishes a number of works by Herbert Spencer.
In addition, another version of Molinari’s Soirées in French, this one with index, bibliography, and an introduction by Molinari’s contemporary Yves Guyot, is available from eVentura, though their online ordering service is not yet up.
A number of Molinari’s works in French are available in HTML format at herve.dequengo.free.fr/Molinari/Molinari.htm – a very useful service! We’ve noticed a couple of typographical errors there, however. The two errors are in Chapter 1 of the Soirées:
The line “les livres, les brochures et la conservation suffiraient” should read “les livres, les brochures et la conversation suffiraient.”
These errors have been corrected in our own online French version. We’ll notify you of other errors if we find them.
The line “phénomène de la consommation graduelle et de l’excitation finale” should read “phénomène de la consommation graduelle et de l’extinction finale.”
11 September 2003
Today is the first anniversary of the Molinari Institute, and the first day of this News & Announcements page.
It is also, of course, the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. For a discussion of the moral of 9/11 for the cause of Market Anarchism, see Roderick Long’s blog entry for today.
A number of additions have been made to our online library:
Gustave de Molinari’s Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare (1849), the first book to defend Market Anarchism, has never been translated into English, apart from David Hart’s translation of the eleventh chapter. Roderick Long has undertaken to translate the entire work; the preface and first chapter have been completed and are now online.
Hu McCulloch’s out-of-print translation of Molinari’s 1849 “The Production of Security” – the first article ever to defend Market Anarchism – is now online (with McCulloch’s kind permission), as is Murray Rothbard’s introduction (with the kind permission of the Mises Institute).
We recently discovered, to our surprise, that in 1877 the American novelist Henry James wrote a review of one of Molinari’s books. This review too is now online.
Molinari had much in common with his contemporary, the English antistatist philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s marvelous 1902 denunciation of militaristic patriotism is online. Roderick Long also defended Spencer’s reputation in a recent article on LewRockwell.com.
The Institute now has its own Yahoo discussion list; you can join here.
The Institute also now has a sister organization, the Institut Molinari in Molinari’s native Belgium.
Over the summer we were contacted by Maurice Gastaldi, the great-grandson of Molinari. He kindly sent us the Molinari family tree and coat of arms. According to the family tree, M. Gastaldi is the son of Marguerite de Molinari (d. 1966), daughter of engineer Edmond Léon de Molinari (1847-1914), son of the Institute’s namesake Gustave Henri de Molinari (1819-1912), who in turn was the son of Philippe de Molinari (1792-1870), the son of François Joseph de Molinari (who, as his Christian name suggests, was an officer in the service of Austria).
The Molinari coat of arms depicts a castle, a crescent moon, a wheel, and a bird, with the motto “IN CRUCE LUX.” The image is in black and white; I hope to obtain a colour image in the future and to put it online. The accompanying documentation describes the creation of the Molinari family title by Emperor Charles V in 1527.
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