Joseph Stromberg

CONVENTIONAL HISTORIANS AND POLITICAL DISCONTENT Historians often view calamitous periods in human history through too many lenses. Take an imaginary happy kingdom, Ozarkia, ruled over by a hereditary monarch, Clinton Jefferson Williams. Here is a ruler with little interest in public affairs but an abiding interest in private ones. He allows his officials to terrorize … Continue reading “Rebels Against State-Building: The General Crisis of the 17th Century”

ANOTHER EXERCISE IN ‘OLD TIMES THERE ARE NOT FORGOTTEN’? I suppose someone might reasonably ask the importance and relevance, at this late date, of the above-named topic. Someone might also ask what such an issue is doing in a column said to be mainly about foreign policy and war. And "Someone," to quote Lonzo and … Continue reading “Is the Union Older Than the States?”

SAXON INSIGHTS CAREFULLY SET FORTH How would our forefathers speak of the wild and crazy times in which we live? I mean, in sooth, our forebears in speech, who gave us our English tongue, wherewith we talk, write, wrangle, and broadly hoodwink one another. I spell this out, lest tightly-wound, high-minded busybodies within the wider … Continue reading “Some Unsaxon Chronicles”

AIN’T GONNA STUDY WAR NO MORE By now a large body of work exists which makes the claim that organized, large-scale war between nation-states is waning, obsolete, or just plain gone from the horizon. A good book which makes this argument is John E. Mueller’s Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: … Continue reading “War Is Dead, Hooray, Hooray”

‘CONSERVATIVE’ SOCIOLOGIST The work of the late Robert Nisbet (1913-1996), conservative and sociologist, still goes unappreciated by many people, libertarians among them, who could learn much from it. At a time when most practitioners of the sociological arts were, at best, bureaucratic liberals, if not outright Marxists and commies, it was remarkable that there were … Continue reading “The Under-Appreciated Robert Nisbet”

WHERE IS PIERRE POUJADE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? We are living through the Second Demonization of American right-wing opinion. The First Demonization, that of the 1950s and ‘60s, took place just when the Right itself was making the transition from relative "isolationism" to full-bore global anticommunist crusading. That transition was rather lost on the left-liberal … Continue reading “Bureaucracy, State, and Empire”

EXTERMINATIONIST BOOGIE WOOGIE BUGLE BOYS Recently, I dismissed the annual debate over US use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a few words. Now, I wish to discuss that topic while August is yet with us and the debate – however tepid – lingers on. As I noted some time ago in a … Continue reading “The Bombs of August”

I have foregone writing about Garet Garrett in this space partly because Justin Raimondo has written so often and eloquently about him in his columns. Nonetheless, Garrett was such an interesting and articulate – if, in the end, forlorn and hopeless – critic of the system of US global meddling that it seems a pity … Continue reading “Garet Garrett (1878-1954) On Empire”

Reading James Bovard’s excellent Freedom in Chains (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) forcefully reminded me of the importance of Étienne de la Boétie. Bovard quotes La Boétie here and there and it dawned on me that the latter’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written in 1552 or ’53 and not published until after his death,1 … Continue reading “Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) and Voluntary Servitude”

Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) was born in Belgium but spent much of his life in France as a member of the French laissez faire liberal school of economists. This school, which dominated economics in France during the 19th century, built upon the work of Jean-Baptiste Say, a far better economist than Adam Smith and a … Continue reading “Gustave de Molinari on States and Defense”