Imaginary construction of the anarchist utopia

By -
As we have seen, anarchists do not even realize that any attempt to implement their own proposals will involve coercion and politics, and perhaps just as much as in the current society. (That is an empirical matter, and we'd have to see it running to decide it.)

Nevertheless, their idea of how they would like their society to function is useful to contemplate. Over the past couple of years, I have come to treat it much as Mises used the evenly rotating economy: an impossible state of affairs, but useful as a foil in thinking about the real world.

Comments

  1. Gorilla Bananas2:32 AM

    Have anarchists ever explained their ideas to a Mafia don? They could get a lot of funding from the organised crime sector. (Predicted anarchist response: "the biggest organised crime syndicate is the State".)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 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
Read more