How a “nasty little man” predicted the 2nd French Revolution and the Cold War.
Early liberal theorists gave French revolutionaries the tools to overthrow oppressive kings, but also to unleash chaos and violence.
Once he entered the intellectual fray, things would never be the same.
Well-behaved women seldom make history, but they should.
Almost two centuries before the women’s lib movement and a full century before the suffragettes, not all women were quiet subordinates to men. In this 1996 essay, historian Jim Powell provides us with an illuminating account of the brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century author and philosopher who never minced her words in defense of equal […]
Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand together comprise the “founding mothers” of modern libertarianism.
My thesis is simple: If you want to square libertarianism with social justice, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is probably not a book you should reach for.
Although Rawls is part of the liberal tradition, he is arguably the pinnacle of the “high” liberal tradition, which is a far cry from the “classical” side I’m more comfortable with.
Jeremy Bentham was born on Feb. 15th, 1748, in Spitalfields, England. One of the main early advocates of utilitarianism — the ethical view that, roughly, an act is right insofar as it promotes happiness, and wrong insofar as it does not — he is best known for his view that “it is the greatest happiness […]
Kant was self-consciously an Enlightenment liberal who believed in limited government and maximum freedom.
A president who truly understood Rand’s philosophy would not be cozying up to Putin, bullying companies to keep manufacturing plants in the United States, or promising “insurance for everybody.”
So 2016 is limping to an end with an assassination of an ambassador, another “inspired” attack on innocents at a Christmas market, and the formal election of a master crony-capitalist to the office of the presidency of the United States.
Classical liberals all agree that government should be limited, but they disagree about how they get to that conclusion.
Would you tell a lie to protect someone from harm?
Here are seven criminally underrated philosophers to celebrate this World Philosophy Day.
Another day, another hilariously awful straw man argument against libertarianism.