I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Should I go on the assumption that I should probably ignore everything ever written by libertarian historians? In your opinion, is there anything left (like by Higgs) that has really stood up?
ReplyDeleteI think Bob Higgs is a good scholar. I have never researched any of his specific claims further, however. Ralph Raico seems generally good. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's book on the Civil War impressed me as well done. _America's Great Depression_ has some interesting material in it, even if it is a little weirdly assembled.
ReplyDeleteThe big thing in historical research is to actually be doing RESEARCH: You have to come in with a question, and not an answer. Partisans of all stripes, not just libertarians, too often do the latter.
I don't know why you cite this article for the claim that the West was exceedingly violent. The statement you quote is found in the article, but only as a quotation of someone else's position. The article itself argues that the West was not, in fact, the frontier of chaos scholars have often made it out to be.
ReplyDeleteThe person was stating what the consensus of historians is. Why does the fact he reached a different conclusion make it somehow invalid for me to extract a quote about the consensus from his abstract?
ReplyDeleteInteresting... but I guess I'm glad Hummel is remaining on my reading list!
ReplyDeleteAnd Ryan, I don't mean these are the only goods works of history by a libertarian.
ReplyDeleteThe key difference: Was it an historian who happened to be a libertarian, or was it a "libertarian historian"? The works of the former are far more likely to be good than those of the latter.