Monthly Archives: July 2011

For those of my readers not already familiar with the Institute for Humane Studies (“IHS”), I would like to provide here a brief introduction. Founded in 1961 by F.A. (“Baldy”) Harper, a Cornell University economist, IHS has for the last 50 years been one of the leading institutions promoting the virtues of classical liberalism/libertarianism. It does so through educational outreach, providing opportunities for faculty members to interact with peers, and through scholarships, seminars and conferences for graduate and undergraduate students on its campus at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, and at other academic institutions around the nation. Its alumni are well represented in the economics, political science, philosophy and history departments of our leading colleges and universities.

Online learning has long been a part of the IHS mission, and it is now in the midst of a major initiative to bring cutting edge scholarship to a wider audience. It has recently launched Liberty Academy, a free, self-paced online education resource featuring leading scholars within the classical liberal tradition. Its first two online courses, The Economic Way of Thinking and Political Philosophy: Liberty and Rights, consist of a series of original 2-5 minute videos, which in their totality provide an excellent introduction to each topic. After each video, students are referred to additional resources where they can delve deeper, discuss the ideas with others, and take a self-assessment to test their understanding.

I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity, and to share it with your friends. There is a link (“Learning Liberty”) to Liberty Academy on the right margin of this page.

In my last post, “Style and Substance in ASU,” I critiqued Barbara Fried’s 2005 essay “Begging the Question With Style: Anarchy, State and Utopia at Thirty Years.” An electronic version of Fried’s piece is available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=523743. My post showed that Fried was deeply misinformed about or deliberately ignored what Nozick claimed for ASU and the substance of much of his argumentation. Moreover, her partisan attack on Nozick was rife with intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy. Apart from these quibbles, it was a noble effort.

With the one exception described below, Fried’s essay was not a frontal attack on the principles Nozick articulated and defended in ASU. Rather, she sought to undermine them through the rather strange method of attacking his style, and specifically by identifying and describing the alleged rhetorical trickery that enables him to cleverly disguise the underlying weakness of his arguments. She thus sought to discredit his entire enterprise “on the cheap,” i.e. without offering any new or interesting reasons to reject any of his central principles.

As just mentioned, Fried departed from her analysis of Nozick’s “devious” style just long enough to offer her readers a single substantive objection to his reasoning. She claims to have noticed a startling inconsistency between Nozick’s insistence on a near-absolute prohibition on the coercion of competent adults in Parts I and II of ASU, and the discussion in Part III of his own conception of what would constitute a “framework for utopias” under libertarian principles. According to Nozick, “Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others” (ASU, 312). Continue Reading »