Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Given Sanders' repeated reference to himself as a "socialist," arguments over the definition of the word have become very vogue. I want to contribute a thought today about a wrong way to proceed. A Facebook friend of mine, who shall go nameless, wrote as follows: "I'd say Stop Signs are socialist. I'd define it very broadly." What he is saying is that any government as the term is usually understood is socialist, because such an institution collects money, at least some of it non-voluntary, and uses at least some of that money for non-controversial purposes such as putting stop signs up in places that help avoid collision and death. There are at least two purposes to which such an argument may be put: If I know that you agree that the word "socialism" names something bad, I may use something like this to push you toward anarchism. On the other hand, If I know that you believe in some sort of government or other, I may use the argument...

Max Weber famously defined the State as the institution of a human community "that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a given territory." That definition had been very useful to anarchists, including anarcho-caps, as it has given us a nice definition of what we are saying we are against when we say we are against the State. The definition raises certain immediate questions. For Americans, accustomed to arguments over the "state" (in the historically specific sense) and the federal government, the question naturally arises whether a state can agree to share its 'monopoly.' Should we define terms so that both Virginia and the USA have some say in deciding what is a legitimate use of violence in downtown Richmond? Is that a duopoly in one sense but still a monopoly in another? Then there is the word "legitimate." The context indicates that Weber sees that state as self-defining in this ...

As the old year crawled to an end, we all received a respite from boring campaign news by a reprise of the "affluenza" story. To review: lawyers for Ethan Couch maintain that his parents spoiled him so thoroughly that he cannot tell right from wrong, that is, he is insane. They lost on that point, and he was convicted of drunk driving that resulted in the death of four people. BUT the sentencing judge seems to have concluded that there was a mitigating factor there, because he suspended the sentence of imprisonment. Maybe the judge simply wanted to reward the creation of a clever portmanteau. Anyway, Couch never spent a day in lock up over those four deaths, although as a convicted felon he was required to check in regularly with his probation officer, and to give up alcohol. Apparently, upon the surfacing of a video suggesting that he was violating the latter condition, he violated the former. He has disappeared. So, in two sentences: 1) Couch was thought to have...

George H. Smith is a  well-known atheist and libertarian writer, born in Japan in 1949. Smith is perhaps best known for Atheism: The Case Against God (1974) . I remember reading this long ago because it had a chapter combining and (unintelligently criticizing) two of the authors I most admire, Blaise Pascal and William James. Smith has become part of a heated controversy in recent days that involves ideas about liberty and feminism, and quite personal accusations involving a thinker/writer who describes herself as working “within the individualist-anarchist tradition,” and a person with whom Smith once had an intimate and a professional relationship, Wendy McElroy. McElroy, pictured here, has become very public in recent months as an opponent of the whole notion of a “rape culture” on campus, and the attendant notion that colleges as social micro-cosmos' have to ‘do something.’ Her advice to victims? “ Rape is a criminal offense, go to the police.”   Pending the...

  We have travelled a long way. A look back is a good way to end a journey. We began with a discussion of some of the concepts essential to any discussion of contemporary finance. Why do stock prices move? Do they move randomly? We discussed the fact that modern finance theory has long used the bell curve as a randomness base line. Related to this, we said that the efficiency of markets, built as it is upon their liquidity and transparency, as well as the fact that a lot of very smart people are looking for an edge in competition with one another, is an adequate explanation for random movements, but that inefficiencies of inefficiencies of markets, which show up as skewed or otherwise non-normal curves, require other explanations. From there we moved to the questions: how stock options derive their value? And, what are the defining facts about bonds, either corporate or sovereign? We also discussed accounting, and so the balance-sheet difference between stock...

The April issue of Harper's includes a review of a book by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, Shakespeare's Montaigne. Joshua Cohen, writing the review, calls it "a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multi-culti study of the development of English and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence." So the working hypothesis of the study is that Shakespeare got his classical education second-hand, largely by reading Montaigne, and that he was at the same time willing to bite the hand that fed him some good material. For example, in his essay "Of the Cannibals," Montaigne sentimentalizes the just discovered people of the Americas, seeing them as peaceful anarchists. He writes that they: hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic super...