Educators From The United States

"The greatness of Turgot now began to appear: while he performed all the duties of the seminary and studied thoroughly what was required, he gave himself to a wide range of other studies, and chiefly in two very different directions—to thought and work upon those problems in religion which transcend all theologies, and upon those problems in politics which are of vast importance in all countries, and which especially needed discussion in his own."

"The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted—whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect."

"TURGOT...I present today one of the three greatest statesmen who fought unreason in France between the close of the Middle Ages and the outbreak of the French Revolution—Louis XI and Richelieu being the two other. And not only this: were you to count the greatest men of the modern world upon your fingers, he would be of the number—a great thinker, writer, administrator, philanthropist, statesman, and above all, a great character and a great man. And yet, judged by ordinary standards, a failure. For he was thrown out of his culminating position, as Comptroller-General of France, after serving but twenty months, and then lived only long enough to see every leading measure to which he had devoted his life deliberately and malignantly undone; the flagrant abuses which he had abolished restored, apparently forever; the highways to national prosperity, peace, and influence, which he had opened, destroyed; and his country put under full headway toward the greatest catastrophe the modern world has seen."

"The theologians who took up the work which the first reformers had laid down soon came to consider intolerance as a main evidence of spiritual life: erelong they were using all their powers in crushing every germ of new thought. Their theory was simply that the world had now reached its climax; that the religion of Luther was the final word of God to man; that everything depended upon keeping it absolutely pure; that men might comment upon it in hundreds of pulpits and lecture rooms and in thousands of volumes;—but change it in the slightest particle—never. And in order that it might never be changed it was petrified into rituals and creeds and catechisms and statements, and, above all, in 1579, into the "Formula of Concord," which, as more than one thoughtful man has since declared, turned out to be a "formula of discord.""

"Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution from his fellow-Protestants more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from Catholics."

"The work of this young professor (Thomasius) and his disciples was to dethrone the heavy Protestant orthodoxy which had nearly smothered German patriotism, to undermine the pedantry which had paralyzed German scholarship, to substitute thought for formulas, to bring right reason to bear upon international and municipal law, to discredit religious intolerance, to root out witchcraft persecution and procedure by torture from all modern codes, and to begin that emancipation, of public and especially university instruction from theological control, which has given such strength to Germany, and which today is invincibly making its way in all other lands, including our own."

"Against all these assertions Grotius published to the world a demonstration that no such rights could exist. His whole argument was mainly a development of two postulates. The first of these was that the right of nations to communicate with one another had been universally recognized; that it was based on a fundamental law of humanity; that the liberty of the sea being necessary to enable nations to communicate with one another, it could not be taken away by any power whatever. The second was that every attempt to make an ocean highway a monopoly of any single nation is forbidden by the immensity of the sea, its lack of stability, its want of fixed limits. This argument in places seemed thin. The book [Mare Liberum], after the custom of the time, was filled with an array—far more than sufficient—of learned citations; but its most significant feature—that which went to make it the herald of a new epoch—was that it took its stand upon the inalienable rights of mankind,—that it mainly deduced these rights neither from revelation nor from national enactments, but from natural law as ascertained by human reason."

"There was strong warrant for pretensions... As far back as 1493, Pope Alexander VI had settled disputes between Spain and Portugal arising out of their rivalry in the Orient and the Occident by drawing a line from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores, giving all west of it to the Spanish, all east of it to the Portuguese. Both these nations attempted more or less persistently to exercise the sway thus given over the oceans as well as over the continent. The Portuguese forbade under heavy penalties any person, whether native or alien, to pass through the waters off the African and Brazilian coasts without special permission; the Spanish were hardly less severe toward those who without leave approached their dependencies. But, though the realization of the earth's rotundity renewed the old difficulty, and Spain and Portugal discovered that the Papal decision was futile, since all their new dominions could be approached both from the east and the west, both nations continued to maintain, as best they could, their sovereignty over the vast oceans. Other nations followed these examples."

"A new danger now beset him [Grotius],—the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client:—a mere legal beast of prey. Fortunately for himself and for the world he took a higher view of his life-work: his determination clearly was to make himself a thoroughly equipped jurist, and then, as he rose more and more in his profession, to use his powers for the good of his country and of mankind."

"He [Grotius] avoided another danger as serious as his precocity had been. He steered clear of the quicksands of useless scholarship, which had engulfed so many strong men of his time. The zeal of learned men in that period was largely given to knowing things not worth knowing, to discussing things not worth discussing, to proving things not worth proving. Grotius seemed plunging on, with all sails set, into these quicksands; but again his good sense and sober judgment saved him: he decided to bring himself into the current of active life flowing through his land and time, and with this purpose he gave himself to the broad and thorough study of jurisprudence."

"Into the very midst of all this welter of evil, at a point in time to all appearance hopeless, at a point in space apparently defenseless, in a nation of which every man, woman, and child was under sentence of death from its sovereign, was born a man who wrought as no other has ever done for a redemption of civilization from the main cause of all that misery; who thought out for Europe the precepts of right reason in international law; who made them heard; who gave a noble change to the course of human affairs; whose thoughts, reasonings, suggestions, and appeals produced an environment in which came an evolution of humanity that still continues. Huig de Groot, afterward known to the world as Hugo Grotius was born at Delft in Holland on Easter day of 1583. It was at the crisis of the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands. That struggle had already continued for twenty years, and just after the close of his first year, in the very town where he was lying in his cradle, came its most fearful event, that which maddened both sides—the assassination of William of Orange, nominally by Balthazar Gerard, really by Philip II of Spain."

"Of all tyrannies of unreason in the modern world, one holds a supremely evil preeminence. It covered the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and throughout those hundred years was waged a war of hatreds,—racial, religious, national, and personal;—of ambitions, ecclesiastical and civil;—of aspirations, patriotic and selfish;—of efforts, noble and vile. During all those weary generations Europe became one broad battlefield,—drenched in human blood and lighted from innumerable scaffolds. In this confused struggle great men appeared—heroes and martyrs, ruffians and scoundrels: all was anarchic. The dominant international gospel was that of Machiavelli."

"His [Sarpi's] career soon revealed another cause of his return; he evidently felt the same impulse which stirred his contemporaries, Lord Bacon and Galileo, for he began devoting himself to the whole range of scientific and philosophical studies, especially to mathematics, physics, astronomy, anatomy, and physiology. In these he became known as an authority, and before long was recognized as such throughout Europe. It is claimed, and it is not improbable, that he anticipated Harvey in discovering the circulation of the blood, and that he was the forerunner of noted discoverers in magnetism. Unfortunately the loss of the great mass of his papers by the fire which destroyed his convent in 1769 forbids any full estimate of his work; but it is certain that among those who sought his opinion and advice were such great discoverers as Acquapendente, Galileo, Torricelli, and Gilbert of Colchester, and that every one of these referred to him as an equal, and indeed as a master."

"He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour."

"A thoughtful historian tells us that, between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, Italy produced three great men. As the first of these, he names Machiavelli, who he says, "taught the world to understand political despotism and to hate it"; as the second, he names Sarpi, who "taught the world after what manner the Holy Spirit guides the Councils of the Church"; and as the third, Galileo, who "taught the world what dogmatic theology is worth when it can be tested by science.""

"While I have given references which will enable historical students to verify my statements and follow them further, I have constantly had in mind the average man intelligently interested in political affairs. It is for this reason that to each of these personages is given a somewhat extended historical setting which may enable any reader to understand his environment, the men and things with which he contended, and the results which he sought and accomplished."

"Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it."

"My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia—where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me."

"My purpose in writing these essays has been to acquaint men who are interested in the bearings of modern history on public life with sundry statesmen whose time was devoted not to seeking office or to winning a brief popular fame by chicanery or pettifoggery, but to serving the great interests of modern states and, indeed, of universal humanity. I would present these statesmen and their work as especially worthy to be studied by those who aspire to serve their country in any way."

"By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs … Nowhere does he recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations."

"Competitions are for horses, not artists."

"In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."

"Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable."

"All interstate wars intensify aggression – maximize it … some wars are even more unjust than others. In other words, all government wars are unjust, although some governments have less unjust claims…"

"It is my contention that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is misnamed because it is actually a variety of socialism, in that it offers an alternative understanding of existing capitalism (or any other variety of statism) as systematic theft from the lower classes and envisions a more just society without that oppression. Rather than depending upon the the labor theory of value to understand this systematic theft, Rothbardian market anarchism utilizes natural law theory and Lockean principles of property and self-ownership taken to their logical extreme as an alternative framework for understanding and combating oppression. ... Murray Rothbard was a visionary socialist ... Because the market anarchist society would be one in which the matter of systematic theft has been addressed and rectified, market anarchism ... is best understood a new variety of socialism—a stigmergic socialism. Stigmergy is a fancy word for systems in which a natural order emerges from the individual choices made by the autonomous components of a collective within the sphere of their own self-sovereignty. To the extent coercion skews markets by distorting the decisions of those autonomous components (individual people), it ought to be seen that a truly free market (a completely stigmergic economic system) necessarily implies anarchy, and that any authentic collectivism is necessarily delineated in its bounds by the the natural rights of the individuals composing the collective."

"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights."

"The natural tendency of the state is inflation."

"It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus."

"If ‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical; it is also ‘voluntary’ on the part of the individual concerned… if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is ‘doing it to himself’ and therefore nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered, instead, they must have ‘committed suicide,’ since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and therefore anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part… the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or less degree."

"Barnes dismissed his own past criticism of the World War II unconditional surrender policy as valid but superficial; for he had learned from General Albert C. Wedemeyer’s book that the murder of Germans and Japanese was the overriding aim of World War II – virtually an Anglo-American scalping party."

"In 1756 Edmund Burke published his first work: Vindication of Natural Society. Curiously enough it has been almost completely ignored in the current Burke revival. This work contrasts sharply with Burke’s other writings, for it is hardly in keeping with the current image of the Father of the New Conservatism. A less conservative work could hardly be imagined; in fact, Burke’s Vindication was perhaps the first modern expression of rationalistic and individualistic anarchism. … "Anarchism" is an extreme term, but no other can adequately describe Burke’s thesis. Again and again, he emphatically denounces any and all government, and not just specific forms of government. … All government, Burke adds, is founded on one "grand error." It was observed that men sometimes commit violence against one another, and that it is therefore necessary to guard against such violence. As a result, men appoint governors among them. But who is to defend the people against the governors? … The anarchism of Burke’s Vindication is negative, rather than positive. It consists of an attack on the State rather than a positive blueprint of the type of society which Burke would regard as ideal. Consequently, both the communist and the individualist wings of anarchism have drawn sustenance from this work."

"One of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically."

"Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants."

"I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words."

"With respect to the homosocial/homosexual style, it seems to be possible to divide Victorian men among three rough categories according to class. The first includes aristocratic men and small groups of their friends and dependents, including bohemians and prostitutes; for these people, by 1865, a distinct homosexual role and culture seem already to have been in existence in England... It seems to have constituted a genuine subculture, facilitated in the face of an ideologically hostile dominant culture by money, privilege, internationalism, and for the most part, the ability to command secrecy... This role is closely related to — is in fact, through Oscar Wilde, the antecedent of — the particular stereotype that at least until recently has characterized American middle-class gay homosexuality; its strongest associations, as we have noted, are with effeminacy, transvestism, promiscuity, prostitution, continental European culture, and the arts."

"Murray Rothbard said, more than once, that there was nothing wrong about a person not fully understanding economics; but that those ignorant of economic principles ought not to be proposing governmental policies to govern economic activity."

"Noam Chomsky describes Murray Rothbard's vision of a libertarian society as "so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it." (I will not attempt to dissect this insane remark here except to note how the "anti-authoritarian" Chomsky purports to speak for all human beings.)"

"Finding no room for intellectual discussion in Rand’s sphere (and years later satirizing her in his embarrassingly juvenile and unpublished play Mozart Was a Red), Rothbard searched for other alliances. So while Buchanan was joining with Nixon, Rothbard was singing the praises of Tricky Dick’s archenemies: the New Left. Sometimes it was hard to tell if the anarchist Rothbard was simply looking for people to take him seriously, and at other times it was hard to tell how they could. For Rothbard, the way to freedom was to destroy the only thing that ever stood in its way: government. He praised the Black Power movement at first, seeing it as a useful opponent to the state (though spending little time writing about race per se, being an ultra-individualist). In 1967 Rothbard wrote that Che Guevara was “an heroic figure for our time” and “the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution.” In other words, my enemy’s enemy is my friend—a principle that the New Right struggles with to this day."

"For the evangelical left, equality and fairness are universally shared goals. Rothbard’s response was a book titled Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. The idea that freedom and democracy are not only compatible but downright synonymous is taken for granted in contemporary American culture, but here Rothbard disagrees as well. The popular conception of democracy is one in which every voter envisions their ideal society and then votes us in that direction. In the anarchist perspective, this is akin to everyone imagining themselves as a totalitarian dictator and then selecting the politician who will best implement their plan into reality. Rothbard thought of the vote in a different way. By regarding all state action as illegitimate, he viewed the two political parties as literal rival gangs whose power needed to be curtailed as much as possible and hopefully destroyed altogether. He regarded the air of prestige around Congress as akin to a Mafia don’s three-piece suit, a pretense of civility masking the murderous thug within. Accordingly, the New Right still regards vulgarity toward and disrespect for the elites as important mechanisms for revealing their true inner evil. Let them drop their masks and expose themselves as the moral abominations that they really are."

"For Rothbard, “no government interference with exchanges can ever increase social utility,” and “[w]e are led inexorably, then, to the conclusion that the processes of the free market always lead to a gain in social utility.” Therefore, “capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can’t really have one without the other.” For Rothbardians—as opposed to their archenemies the neocons—the worst of all government activity is war: “It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.” There is no difference between a Lois Lerner and a beat cop. They are both enforcers of the state, albeit in different clothing."

"For Rothbard, it was precisely capitalism that was the one and only savior of mankind. Whereas Buchanan was a strict constitutionalist and a strong patriot, Rothbard was opposed to government itself—and not just the American government, but all government. According to Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism, all state functions could be served cheaper, better, and more effectively by the free market. This included the police and even national defense."

"It may come as a surprise to learn that for Rothbard the New Left's most "crucial contribution to both ends and means…is its concept of 'participatory democracy.'" … This may seem less surprising once one realizes that for Rothbard the free market is the fullest realization of participatory democracy. … The political appeal of participatory democracy for Rothbard was its requirement of decentralization, and its rejection of a layer of political "representatives" above the people. But Rothbard also found the idea appealing outside the narrowly political sphere. He wrote: "Participatory democracy is at the same time…a theory of politics and a theory of organization, an approach to political affairs and to the way New Left organizations (or any organizations, for that matter) should function." And he praised "fascinating experiments in which workers are transformed into independent and equal entrepreneurs." Traditional "socialist" goals such as workers' control of industry, then, were apparently not anathema to Rothbard.Indeed, he would later argue that any nominally private institution that gets more than 50% of its revenue from the government, or is heavily complicit in government crimes, or both, should be considered a government entity; since government ownership is illegitimate, the proper owners of such institutions are "the 'homesteaders', those who have already been using and therefore 'mixing their labor' with the facilities." This entails inter alia "student and/or faculty ownership of the universities." As for the "myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex," one solution, Rothbard says, is to "turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants." He also supported third-world land reforms considered socialistic by many conservatives, on the grounds that existing land tenure represented "continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil.""

"Let me take the liberty of being uncharitable but truthful.Rothbard had a problem. He thought he was a great economist, but practically nobody within the profession agreed and most of them had never heard of him. Rothbard had a solution. He was ignored because he held extreme pro-market views, which were ideologically unpopular in the academy. Rothbard had a problem. Milton Friedman held extreme pro-market views--not as extreme as Rothbard's, but far enough from academic orthodoxy so that the same effect should have existed. But Milton Friedman not only wasn't ignored, he was viewed within the profession as a leading figure--despite his unpopular political views. Rothbard had a solution--to persuade himself and his followers that Milton Friedman was really one of them instead of one of us, hence his acceptance by the profession didn't contradict Rothbard's view of the reason for Rothbard's non-acceptance.Maintaining that claim was difficult--at one point I remember being told by a Rothbard supporter, explaining why he was not going to publish a letter of mine in his journal that contained quotes from my father inconsistent with Rothbard's account of my father's views, that if Rothbard and Friedman disagreed about what Friedman's views were, Rothbard was right."

"According to Rothbard, a child becomes an adult not when he reaches some arbitrary age limit, but rather when he does something to establish his ownership and control over his own person: namely, when he leaves home, and becomes able to support himself. This criteria, and only this criteria, is free of all the objections to arbitrary age limits. Moreover, not only is it consistent with the libertarian homesteading theory, it is but an application of it. For by leaving home and becoming his own means of support, the ex-child becomes an initiator, as the homesteader, and owes his improved state to his own actions."

"One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, "our side," had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as "liberal," had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves father feebly "true" or "classical" liberals. "Libertarians"’, in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual's right to his property. , p. 83"

"Shameless sponging on friends and relatives … Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was too anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money."

"John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father."

"The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong."

"A parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)? The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such "neglect" down to a minimum.)"

"Freedom can run a monetary system as superbly as it runs the rest of the economy. Contrary to many writers, there is nothing special about money that requires extensive governmental dictation."