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...
Is the Union Older Than the States?
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...
Some Unsaxon Chronicles
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...
War Is Dead, Hooray, Hooray
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...
The Under-Appreciated Robert Nisbet
'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...
Bureaucracy, State, and Empire
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...
The Bombs of August
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 –...
Garet Garrett (1878-1954) On Empire
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...
Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) and Voluntary Servitude
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...
Gustave de Molinari on States and Defense
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...