leftlibertarian.org

As I was just saying earlier today, I’ve been thinking that my readers might be interested in some of the topics that Susan Moller Okin touches on in her masterpiece, Women in Western Political Thought. The book is published by Princeton University Press. I thought you might enjoy thinking about some material which I’ve quoted here for educational purposes under principles of fair use. Especially stuff like the programmatic material on pages 3-12, where Okin explains how Western political thought has so far been shaped, in part, by the fact that women’s status and women’s concerns have been confined to the margins of political thought. Thus, she writes:

Introduction

The current feminist movement has inspired a considerable amount of scholarship in areas previously unexplored. The recent focus on women in the fields of history, legal studies, anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism has resulted in a number of innovative and important works, such that it is no exaggeration to say that these fields will never look the same again. No one, however, has yet examined systematically the treatment of women in the classic works of political philosophy—those works in which great thinkers throughout history have revealed to us their thoughts about the political and social life of the human race. This book is an attempt to reduce the consequent gap in our knowledge.

It is important to realize from the outset that the analysis and criticism of the thoughts of political theorists of the past is not an arcane academic pursuit, but an important means of comprehending and laying bare the assumptions behind deeply rooted modes of thought that continue to affect people’s lives in major ways. Women, in the course of the present century, have officially become citizens in virtually every country of the Western world and in much of the rest of the world as well. From being totally relegated to th private sphere of the household, they have become enfranchised members of the political realm. However, women are increasingly recognizing that the limited, formal, political gains of the earlier feminist movement have in no way ensured the attainment of real equalities in the economic and social aspects of their lives. Though women are now citizens, it is undeniable that they have remained second-class citizens. Measured in terms of characteristics traditionally valued in citizens, such as education, economic independence, or occupational status, they are still far behind men. Likewise, measured in terms of political participation—especially at higher levels—and political power, they are nowhere near the equals of men. In the past decade, moreover, women have been demanding these more substantial equalities, and an end to their relegation to second-class citizenship. They have been claiming the right to be members of society and citizens of the state on an equal level with men, and, in principle at least, their claims have been getting recognition.

The fact that women have gained formal citizenship, but have in no other respect achieved equality with men, has impelled me to turn to the great works of political philosophy, with two major questions in mind. I have asked, first, whether the existing tradition of political philosophy can sustain the inclusion of women in its subject matter, and if not, why not? For if the works which form the basis of our political and philosophical heritage are to continue to be relevant in a world in which the unequal position of women is being radically challenged, we must be able to recognize which of their assumptions and conclusions are inherently connected with the idea that the sexes are, and should be, fundamentally unequal.

Second, and clearly related to the first inquiry, I have aimed to discover whether the philosophers’ arguments about the nature of women and their proper place in the social and political order, viewed in the context of the complete political theories of the philosophers, will help us to understand why the formal, political enfranchisement of women has not led to substantial equality between the sexes. It is not my purpose to argue any causal connection between the arguments and ideas of the great philosophers, on the one hand, and modern ideas or practices, on the other. However, I do argue that modes of thought about women that closely parallel those of some of the philosophers discussed here are still prevalent, in the writings of modern thinkers, and in the ideologies of modern political actors and institutions. This claim is substantiated in Part V, where we turn to analysis of some crucial contemporary views on women—those of influential social scientists and of the highest courts in the U.S.—and discover striking similarities between them and the ideas of the political theorists analyzed in the preceding chapters. By critical study of the arguments about women conceived by some of the finest minds in the history of Western thought, I hope to add to our comprehension of modern arguments which parallel them in important ways, and which constitute a continuing attempt to justify the unequal treatment of women.

It must be recognized at once that the great tradition of political philosophy consists, generally speaking, of writings by men, for men, and about men. While the use of supposedly generic terms like man and mankind, and of the allegedly inclusive pronoun he, might lead one to think that philosophers have intended to refer to the human race as a whole, we do not need to look far into their writings to realize that such an assumption is unfounded. Rousseau, for example, tells his reader at the beginning of the Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men that It is of man that I am to speak. It subsequently becomes very clear that it is only the inequality between males that is the subject of his investigation, and the inequality between the sexes is assumed in passing.¹ Past and present feminists, only too aware of such practices, have pointed out the dangerous ambiguity of such linguistic usage in a patriarchal culture.² For it enables philosophers to enunciate principles as if they were universally applicable, and then to proceed to exclude all women from their scope.

Even when philosophers have used words which in their respective languages refer unambiguously to any human being, they have felt in no way deterred from excluding women from the conclusions reached. Aristotle, for example, discusses at length what is the highest good for a human being (anthropos). He then proceeds to characterize all women as not only conventionally deprived of, but constitutionally unfitted for, this highest good. Again, Kant uses the most inclusive terms of all for the subjects of his ethical and political theory; he even says that he is not confining his discussion to humans, but that it is applicable to all rational beings. Subsequently, however, he proceeds to justify a double standard of sexual morality, to the extent that a woman is to be condoned for killing her illegitimate child because of her duty to uphold, at all costs, her sexual honor. He also reaches the conclusion that the only characteristic that permanently disqualifies any person from citizenship in the state, and therefore from the obligation to obey only those laws to which consent has been given, is that of being born female.³ Thus, even words such as person, human, and rational being, apparently, do not necessarily include women.

This phenomenon, made possible by the ambiguity of our language, is not confined to political philosophy. The grand statements of our political culture, too, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are phrased in universal terms, but, as the chapter on women and the law will make clear, they have frequently been interpreted in such a way as to exclude women. Thus when the Founding Fathers declared it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, not only did they intend the substantial slave population to be excluded from the scope of their statement, but they would have been amused and skeptical (as indeed John Adams was to his wife’s appeal that they not forget the ladies) at the suggestion that women were, and should be considered, equal too.⁴ Similarly, though the Constitution is phrased in terms of persons, there was clearly no idea in its framers’ minds that this word might be interpreted so as to include women on the same terms as men.⁵

Human nature, we realize, as described and discovered by philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and many others, is intended to refer only to male human nature. Consequently all the rights and needs that they have considered humanness to entail have not been perceived as applicable to the female half of the human race. Thus there has been, and continues to be, within the traditions of political philosophy and political culture, a pervasive tendency to make allegedly general statements as if the human race were not divided into two sexes, and then either to ignore the female sex altogether, or to proceed to discuss it in terms not at all consistent with the assertions that have been made about man and humanity.

In spite of this general neglect of women, however, several of the most important and most interesting of political philosophers have had a considerable amount to say about them. The first four parts of this book comprise an analysis of the arguments of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill, on the subject of women, their nature, their socialization and education, and their proper role and station in society. It would be fruitless, if not impossible, to treat such a subject in a vacuum. What I have done, therefore, is to analyze these philosophers’ ideas about women in the context of their entire theories of politics and society, and with particular reference to each philosopher’s conception of the role of the family. Throughout the study, I have examined the various ideas about women and the arguments which sustain them, with a concern both for their internal logic and for their consistency with each philosopher’s argument and conclusions about men, and about politics and society as a whole.

Clearly, in choosing four philosophers I do not pretend to have covered the treatment of women within the entire tradition of political philosophy. Apart from the omission of the socialists, which requires explanation, however, I have chosen those four who of all political theorists have made the most substantial, most interesting, and most thought-provoking contributions on the subject.

The problem regarding Marx, the Marxists, and other socialists, is that, taken together, they had so much to say, and such insight to offer, on the subject of women in society, that their ideas warrant a separate study. It was the utopian, Charles Fourier, who first both used the status of women in a society as the fundamental measuring stick of its advancement, and considered the progress of women toward liberty to be a fundamental cause of general social progress. Other events influence these political changes; he asserts, but there is no cause which produces social progress or decline as rapidly as a change in the condition of women…. The extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.⁶ Fourier’s initiatives were not ignored by subsequent feminists and/or socialists, including Flora Tristan, Marx and John Stuart Mill. Marx developed the idea of the relationship between the equality of women and general social progress, in the 1844 Manuscripts:

The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him…. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed.⁷

Though Marx himself did not develop this as a major theme in his works, Engels, Bebel, and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have developed further the socialist criticism of woman’s position in society, and of the traditional family.

Socialist writings on women require separate study because of two features which are characteristic of, though not unique to, socialist modes of thought. First, socialist theorists have been far less inclined than most other political theorists to regard the family as a necessary and fixed human institution, and have been very much aware of the relationship between various forms of family organization and different forms of economic structure, particularly property relations. This has meant that most, though not all, socialists who have written about women have taken a critical and questioning view of woman’s role within the family, rather than accepting it as a given. Second, socialist thought is noticeably lacking in the tendency to idealize nature and the natural, and is inclined to replace these criteria for social excellence by the specifically human and cultural. It is largely because of the importance of both these modes of thought for the subject of women, that the contribution of the socialists to the subject is so considerable. The study of that contribution is a task I hope to undertake, and for which the present work constitutes an essential foundation.

From my analysis of the arguments and conclusions of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill, concerning women and their proper social and political role, two interconnected themes emerge. First, the most important factor influencing the philosophers’ conceptions of, and arguments about, women has been the view that each of them held concerning the family. Those who have regarded the family as a natural and necessary institution have defined women by their sexual, procreative, and child-rearing functions within it. This has lead to the prescription of a code of morality and conception of rights for women distinctly different from those that have been prescribed for men. The assumption of the necessity of the family leads the theorists to then regard the biological differences between the sexes as entailing all the other, conventional and institutional differences in sex role which the family, especially in its most patriarchal forms, has required.

Second, as a consequence of the above, the constricted role in which woman has been placed has been regarded as dictated by her very nature. Thus, where philosophers have explicitly discussed women, they have frequently not extended to them their various conceptions of human nature. They have not only assigned women a distinct role, but have defined them separately, and often contrastingly, to men. They have sought for the nature of women not, as for the nature of men, by attempting to separate out nature from the effects of nurture, and to discover what innate potential exists beneath the overlay which results from socialization and other environmental factors. The nature of women, instead, has been seen to be dictated by whatever social and economic structure the philosophers favor and to be defined as whatever best suits their prescribed functions in that society. Philosophers who, in laying the foundation for their political theories, have asked What are men like? What is man’s potential? have frequently, in turning to the female sex, asked What are women for? There is, then, an undeniable connection between assigned female nature and social structure, and a functionalist attitude to women pervades the history of political thought.

The conclusions drawn here are, first, that women cannot simply be added to the subject matter of existing political theory, for the works of our philosophical heritage are to a very great extent built on the assumption of the inequality of the sexes. In the case of theorists for whom equality, in some form or other, is an important value, the unequal treatment of women tends to be concealed by the adoption of the male-headed family, rather than the individual adult, as the primary unit of political analysis. Indeed, the thoroughly equal treatment of women, involving far more than the right to vote, requires the rethinking of some of the most basic assumptions of political philosophy—having to do with the family and woman’s traditionally dependent and subordinate role within it.

Second, as we examine some twentieth-century perceptions of women and analyze legal discrimination against women, it becomes clear that these findings should be of interest not only to historians or students of political theory. The functionalist treatment of women—the prescriptive view of woman’s nature and proper mode of life based on her role and functions in a patriarchal family structure—is still alive and influential today. Giant figures in modern sociology and psychology present arguments about women that parallel those of Aristotle and Rousseau. Moreover, when we examine the opinions handed down by the highest courts of the land in cases involving sex discrimination, we find, here too, that judges have used functionalist reasoning of a strikingly Aristotelian character in order to justify their treatment of women as a class apart. Thus, there is no doubt that a thorough understanding of this mode of argument can help us to see why women, in spite of their political enfranchisement, are still second-class citizens.

The chapters that follow require one more word of explanation. Obviously, there are many types of inequality both in the real world and in political theory. Only one type of inequality is dealt with here—the unequal treatment of women. As will become evident, the positions taken by political theorists about other types of equality and inequality are by no means necessarily parallel to, or even consistent with, their views about the equal or unequal treatment of the sexes. Those who have argued that there should be complete or virtual equality between the sexes have sometimes been distinctly inegalitarian in other respects; on the other hand, some philosophers who have made strong arguments for equality amongst women have been just as strongly opposed to equality for women. I have not undertaken to discuss this except insofar as a philosopher’s more general egalitarianism or inegalitarianism affects his arguments about distinctions betwen the sexes, or clarifies the presentation of these arguments. This is not because I consider other types of inequality unimportant. It is, rather, because the unequal treatment of women has remained for too long shamefully neglected by students of political thought. Other types of inequality—class inequality in particular, but also inequalities based on race, religion, caste, or ethnicity, have not been so consistently ignored.

In one sense, this book might be compared with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In that play, building on the foundation of Hamlet, Tom Stoppard emphasizes this originally elusive pair, and makes them, instead of the traditional hero, into the principal focus of the drama. As a result, the play, all its characters, and their relations to each other take on an entirely new perspective. Similarly, when women, who have always been minor characters in the social and political theory of a patriarchal world, are transformed into major ones, the entire cast and the play in which it is acting look very different.

¹ The First and Second Discourses, p. 101.

² One of the earliest feminsits to point out this anomaly was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a pioneer work in the correction of the language and orientation of liberalism, exemplified in her time by Thomas Paine and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. For two recent discussions of the sexism inherent in our language, see Elizabeth Lane Beardsley, Referential Genderization, and Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, pp. 34–38.

³ Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss. Cambridge, 1970, pp. 43–47, 78, 158–159.

⁴ Excerpts from the Adams Family Correspondence, in Alice Rossi, The Feminist Papers, New York, 1973, pp. 9–11.

⁵ See for example the beginning of Chapter 11 below, for Jefferson’s views on this issue.

⁶ The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, pp. 195–196.

⁷ Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 154.

—Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 1979). 3–12.

Have women been shoved to the margins of political philosophy? Have male political philosophers reduced women’s nature and status to their perceived functions within the family? Are political philosophers stances on social equality between men and women so often inconsistent with, or simply determined independently of, their express views on egalitarianism as a general principle? What else from Okin’s work might help illuminate the points she touches on here? Discuss.

29 May 2008

A couple of days back, WPVM in Asheville, North Carolina did a show on the recent NWTRCC conference in Birmingham, Alabama.

The show is mostly the result of the hard work of Clare Hanrahan, who was at the conference as a participant, but was also recording the proceedings and interviewing others who were there.

You can listen to the show on-line (click the “Stream” button) — it’s like being there. Listening to the show, I felt like I was back in Birmingham hearing the stories and voices all over again. If you couldn’t make it to the conference, this is the next best thing.

I got another CP 504 notice from the IRS a couple of days ago. Nothing exciting or interesting, just them letting me know that I’d neglected to include a check with my 2007 return — pretty much the same package I described in my 12 September 2006 post but with a new set of numbers attached. For the record, I didn’t pay $3,695 in 2007, and so I got dinged with an estimated tax penalty of $168 when I filed my 1040. Since then, they’ve added an additional $62.94 in interest & penalties.

James Bowden and Isaac Zane complain that during the American Revolution, Quakers got it from both sides — the British and the rebels — due to their refusal to support the militaries.

From The History of the Society of Friends in America, Vol. II: Pennsylvania and New Jersey (1854):

During the occupation of Philadelphia by the British army, the members of our religious Society, in common with others of the citizens, suffered considerably by the wanton excesses and plunder of the soldiery. A committee of Friends had an interview with General Howe on this subject. In the country, over most parts of which the Americans still held control, the sufferings of Friends were even more severe. Many were subjected to heavy fines, imprisonments, and other oppressions, for conscientiously refusing to join in warlike demonstrations; and it is not a little singular, that in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, — provinces founded under the especial auspices of members of our Society, — their trials in this respect were greater than in other parts of the Union. The Meeting for Sufferings of Philadelphia, having received information of the imprisonment of many on this account, in several localities, presented an address, in the Eighth Month, 1778, to the Assembly of Pennsylvania on the subject. “They respectfully represent, that the government of the consciences of men is the prerogative of Almighty God, who will not give His glory to another; that every encroachment on this his prerogative, is offensive in his sight, and that he will not hold them guiltless who invade it, but will sooner or later manifest his displeasure to all who persist therein. These truths,” they say, “will, we doubt not, obtain the assent of every considerate mind. The immediate occasion of our now applying to you, is [that] we have received accounts from different places, that a number of our friends are and have been imprisoned, some for refusing to pay the fines imposed in lieu of personal services in the present war, and others for refusing to take the test prescribed by some laws lately made. The ground of our refusal is a religious scruple in our minds against such compliance, not from obstinacy, or any other motive than a desire of keeping a conscience void of offence towards God, which we cannot, without a steady adherence to our peaceable principles and testimony against wars and fightings, founded on the precepts and example of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace; by a conformity to which we are bound to live a peaceable and quiet life, and restrained from making any declaration or entering into any engagements as parties in the present unsettled state of public affairs.” After alluding to the manner in which civil and religious liberty had been secured to the inhabitants of Pennsylvania under the charter of its enlightened founder, they express a desire that “the laws which have a tendency to oppress tender consciences may be repealed,” and that provision may be made for the release of those who are in “bonds for the testimony of a good conscience, and which may prevent others hereafter from suffering in like manner.”

The year 1779, brought no mitigation of the sufferings of Friends. Fines and imprisonments for refusing to bear arms, were rigorously enforced, and not only so, but many were now subjected to heavy exactions for refusing to become collectors of the taxes imposed for maintaining the war; an office which the Revolutionists seemed determined to urge on their more peaceable neighbors. Strong remonstrances on this grievance were made to those in power; but amidst the excitement and tumults of war, very little disposition existed to lend an ear to conscientious pleadings for the Christian principles of peace. The distraints upon Friends on these various accounts, in five of the Quarterly Meetings, in Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting, as returned to the Meeting for Sufferings, amounted during this year to upwards of nine thousand five hundred pounds, three of the Quarterly Meetings having omitted to make a return; and even this large sum did not include many cases of spoil, the value of which had not been returned.

…[I]n the Eleventh Month, 1779, a forcible appeal… was presented to the Assembly of Pennsylvania…

On the subject of conscience they remark, “Duty to Almighty God made known in the consciences of men, and confirmed by the Holy Scriptures, is an invariable rule, which should govern their judgment and actions. He is the only Lord and sovereign of conscience, and to Him we are accountable for our conduct, as by Him all men are to be finally judged. — By conscience we mean, the apprehension and persuasion a man has of his duty to God; and the liberty of conscience we plead for, is a free open profession and unmolested exercise of that duty — such a conscience as, under the influence of Divine Grace, keeps within the bounds of morality in all the affairs of human life, and teaches to live soberly, righteously, and godly in the world.”

After alluding to the grounds of their objection to war and oaths, to the sufferings of many of their members on these accounts, and to the “groundless reports and misrepresentations” respecting Friends, they conclude thus: — “The matters we have now freely laid before you are serious and important, which we wish you to consider wisely as men, and religiously as Christians; manifesting yourselves friends to true liberty, and enemies to persecution, by repealing the several penal laws affecting tender consciences, and restoring to us our equitable rights, that the means of education and instruction of our youth, which we conceive to be our reasonable and religious duty, may not be obstructed, and that the oppressed may be relieved. In your consideration whereof we sincerely desire that you may seek for, and be directed by that supreme “wisdom, which is pure, peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits.”

In presenting the address, the Committee accompanied it with a selection of cases of Oppression arising from the laws in question. All the documents were referred by the Assembly to the Committee of Grievances, who, in the Fourth Month, 1780, took the extraordinary and inquisitorial course of proposing a series of questions to the Society to be answered in writing. These related chiefly to an acknowledgment of the American Government — to the validity of its laws — to the paper money, and concluded with the following singular request: “As you are specially associated together, though not incorporated in law, and issue public letters and recommendations, and promulgate opinions not only on religious, but political subjects, or at least uniting them together, you are requested to communicate the letters and testimonies which have been published from time to time for seven years past, and signed by the clerks of your General or Quarterly Meetings of this city, to be sent to other meetings, or to persons of your Society.”

The questions proposed had the close and serious consideration of the Friends appointed on the subject, who did not think proper to submit so far to this categorical and despotic proceeding, as to return specific answers to the several questions; but concluded again to invite those in power to a calm and impartial examination for themselves, of the principles of Friends set forth in their address, as furnishing a sufficient explanation for their not uniting in the present contest with Great Britain. The reply commenced as follows: —

To the Committee of Grievances,

Your paper directed to Isaac Zane and others, propounding diverse questions to our religious Society, has been considered, and, agreeable to the advice of an eminent Apostle to his Christian brethren, it becomes us “to be always ready to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in us with meekness and fear,” so also we think it necessary, according to their practice, after the example of their Lord and Master, to adapt the answer to the nature and tendency of the question proposed.

On reviewing the Memorial presented to the Assembly, and our address to you, they appear to us to contain matter of such importance, and so clearly point out the sentiments and practice of our religious Society, in the various changes and revolutions which have occurred in civil government since we were distinguished from other Christian professions, that a weighty, impartial attention to them, and a willingness to remove the cause of oppression complained of, would, we apprehend, sufficiently enable you to represent to the House, the justice and expediency of relief, on the principles of Christian and civil liberty.

Our religious meetings were instituted for the laudable intention of inculcating in our fellow-members, worship to Almighty God, benevolence to mankind, and to encourage one another in a steadfast, upright conduct, according to the pure principles of the Gospel; and have been continued for those Christian purposes for more than a century past; nor has the original design of their institution been perverted to the purpose of political disquisitions, or any thing prejudicial to the public safety: we therefore conceive the queries you have proposed to us in a religious capacity, are improper, and a mode of redressing grievances new and unprecedented, and such an inquisition made on a religious Society, as we have not known nor heard of in America; nevertheless, we may briefly repeat what has been already declared on behalf of our religious Society, to revive the important subject of the Memorial in your view; which we think is still worthy of a very serious and unbiased consideration.

Our Friends have always considered Government to be a divine ordinance, instituted for the suppressing vice and immorality, the promotion of virtue, and protection of the innocent from oppression and tyranny. And they esteem those legislators and magistrates, who make the fear and honor of God the rule of their conduct, to be worthy of respect and obedience. And that it is our duty to live a godly, peaceable, and quiet life. It is also our firm belief that conscience ought not to be subject to the control of men, or the injunctions of human laws; and every attempt to restrain or enforce it, is an invasion of the prerogative of the Supreme Lord and Lawgiver.

After referring to their reasons for objecting to all war, it proceeds thus:

As our Christian principle leads into a life of sobriety and peace, so it restrains us from taking an active part in the present contest, or joining with any measures which tend to create or promote disturbance or commotions in the government under which we are placed; and many of our brethren, from a conviction that war is so opposite to the nature and spirit of the Gospel, apprehend it their duty to refrain in any degree voluntarily contributing to its support; some of whom, for a considerable number of years past on former occasions, have not actively complied with the payment of taxes raised for military services; and diverse from conscientious motives, have now avoided circulating the currency which has been emitted for the immediate purpose of carrying on war; although on these accounts, they have been, and still are, subjected to great inconvenience, losses, and sufferings. It has been the uniform practice of our religious Society, after the example of other Christian churches in every age, to issue epistles of counsel and admonition to their members as occasion required; those and the testimonies you allude to, contain seasonable exhortations to observe a godly conduct, consistent with the peaceable principles of our Christian profession; and the papers and records of some of our meetings were seized and detained in the Ninth Month, 1777, and, after undergoing a scrutiny and examination, nothing seditious or prejudicial to the public good being found in them, they were returned.

In whatever mistaken or unfavorable light our religious Society may be held, by those who are unacquainted with us and our principles, or prejudiced against us, we hope to manifest by our conduct, that we are true friends to all men, and sincerely desirous to promote and inculcate such a temper of mind in our fellow-professors in general, as to enable us to forgive them who evilly entreat us, and pray for them who persecute us. Signed on behalf of the Committee of the people called Quakers, who waited on the Assembly of Pennsylvania, with a memorial and address, in the Eleventh Month, 1779.

Isaac Zane

Another story from the same volume concerns John Cowgill, who refused to use the Continental Currency:

John Cowgill of Duck Creek, for refusing to take the paper currency, was arrested and taken before a body called a Committee of Inspection; and having declined to give assurances that he would alter his course, was advertised in the newspapers, as an enemy to his country, all persons being warned against having any dealings with him. The effect was, that some millers refused to grind his corn, whilst the schoolmaster who taught his children, sent them home. On one occasion as he was going with his family to a week-day meeting, he was seized by a number of armed men, who told him that the Committee had sent for him. These men, having fixed a paper on his back inscribed, “On the circulation of the Continental currency depends the fate of America,” conveyed him in a cart to a neighboring town, and in this manner paraded him through it.

There are a variety of libertarian and anarchist-aligned efforts that continually need your financial support. While we all would like to think that the big donations from donors better off than ourselves can carry the weight, the awkward truth of these matters is that the non-corrupt organizations that refuse to sell out to the ruling class MUST raise their money by getting lots of small donations from ordinary folks like you and me. That’s just economic reality.

Infoshop.org is the nexus for anarchism online. Not “market anarchism” but simply anarchism — including commies, syndicalists, primitivists, surrealists, Groucho Marxists and more. I support the Alternative Media Project and its “ecclesiastical” approach to building a diverse and polycentric anti-authoritarian left. I want to make free-market libertarianism, properly understood, a part of that left.

The project needs our help. Please join me in supporting Infoshop.org and the Alternative Media Project. I just gave $5 via Little Black Cart.

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[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

An old joke has an alcoholic asking a priest, “Is it okay for me to drink while I’m praying?”

“Certainly not!” says the priest.

“Well, is it okay for me to pray while I’m drinking?” the alcoholic inquires.

The priest responds: “Absolutely!”

I’m reminded of this joke by the disagreement among libertarians over the role of the LP. (See, for example, the exchange between Brad Spangler and Less Antman in the comments section of this post. In fact the present post started as a contribution to that discussion until I decided it merited a post unto itself.) Just as it’s good to pray while you’re drinking, but bad to drink while you’re praying, so it’s good for the libertarian movement that radicals leave the LP, but also good for the movement that the LP have radicals in it.

Let me explain both sides of the paradox. Why is it good for the movement that radicals leave the LP? Because if the best way to achieve a libertarian society is to encourage the populace (via education and counter-economics) to withdraw consent and render themselves ungovernable, thus leaving the state apparatus to collapse – as opposed to seeking liberation through the state apparatus – then electoral politics is a counter-productive form of education, since it instead encourages people to continue looking to electoral politics as the natural venue for political change.

Why is it good for the movement that the LP have radicals in it? Because although electoral politics should never be the primary focus of libertarian education, so long as there is a self-proclaimed libertarian political party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, thus making the job of education easier or harder as the case may be. A libertarian party that puts forward relatively radical/leftish candidates like Ruwart thus helps the cause of radical libertarian education more (or, if you prefer, hinders it less) – in that respect, at least – than a libertarian party that puts forward relatively moderate/conservative/statist candidates like Barr. (No, I don’t think the adjectives “moderate,” “conservative,” and “statist” are interchangeable, exactly, but that’s another story. They’re all bad anyway.)

The paradox isn’t a contradiction. There is a respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by participating in the LP. There is a different respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by repudiating the LP. The question is how to weigh these two respects against each other. Most participants in the dispute seem to think it’s obvious how to weigh them (though their answers differ), but I don’t find it nearly so obvious.

To most people, the word “libertarian” means the Libertarian Party. One might react to this fact by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to steer the LP in a radical direction so as to project the right image. One might instead react by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to repudiate the LP loudly and forcefully so as to undermine the mistaken identification. I myself feel the pull of both considerations fairly strongly.

A repudiationist will argue that even if what the LP says does influence the success of agorist education, the solution is simply to abolish the LP. Maybe so, but there’s no magic button that will abolish it. In any case, there are also some strategic reasons for wanting such a party around come the revolution, for reasons I’ve discussed before. So I don’t think the case for repudiation is ironclad.

On the other hand, I certainly don’t think the case for participation is ironclad either. For one thing, there’s a strong case to be made for its being impossible – or at least bloody difficult – for radicals to work effectively in the party. Whatever we do in the party will either succeed or fail in making the LP more popular. If it fails, then obviously whatever we’re doing is not effective. If it succeeds, then more people will join the party, but the likely result of that is watering down the party and moving it in a moderate direction. Arguably this is already happening.

Less sees reason for optimism in the fact that “after 6 ballots 45% of the delegates still wanted an openly anarchist candidate.” Yes, that is some reason for optimism. But is the party likely to get more radical or less radical after the Barr-Root campaign? What kind of people is that campaign likely to bring into the party – people more likely to swell that 45% or more likely to diminish it? Surely the latter. Are there enough radicals to offset that trend if they got involved in droves? It’s not obvious.

I’m not arguing for any particular conclusion here. I’m through with the LP for this election (it’ll be the first since ’88 that I haven’t supported the presidential nominee), but I’m not committed to abandoning it forever. Though I’m not committed to going back either. (I let my membership lapse years ago, so I can’t have the satisfaction of formally quitting to protest the Barr-Root nomination.)

The good news is that in the end I don’t think that much turns on this issue. I think the pro-LP side tends to exaggerate the benefits of a libertarian political party, but I also think the agorist side tends to exaggerate the extent of harm that it does. Electoral politics is in the end peripheral to the central tasks of libertarian education and building alternative institutions.

Agorist Demerit Count: 4.5

… by using the force of law to try to prevent Georgia State University students from accessing works of science and the useful arts unless they pay $50–$100 a pop to go through an academic publishing racket for obscure books with little resale value.

(Via Roderick Long @ Austro-Athenian Empire 2008-05-21.)

Please note that in the real world, outside the fever-dreams of academic publishers, sharing books and articles is an essential part of the life of a research university. Besides lending the book itself, every department has a copy machine, and every professor uses it, quite often, to run off paper copies of articles or chapters that they give away to their students. I have a file box with easily several thousand pages worth of xeroxed articles that I accumulated over the course of my college career. Or, if the professor doesn’t have the book herself, or doesn’t want to put the xeroxes on her tab with the department, every University library has self-serve xerox machines and a book-reserve system, where the professor can ensure that a copy of the book is always available for students to share with each other, and to xerox the relevant sections out of if they want to take it back to read on their own time. And all this is available even though professors could have forced each and every student to go down and pay for the $50-$100 anthology at the University bookstore.

Are these godless commies and lying, thieving mutualists that infest the Academy stealing from poor, innocent academic publishers by passing around xeroxes? No; all it is is that they aren’t insane, and they are aware that supporting some particular academic publisher’s business model is not their students’ responsibility.

Yet as soon as the University eliminates the paper medium, and facilitates exactly the same thing through an non-commercial, internal University course pack website — which does nothing at all more than what the xerox packets did, except that it delivers the information to pixels on a monitor instead of toner on a page — the publishers’ racket can run to court, throw up its arms, and start hollering Computers! Internet!, send their lawyers to try to shake down have a discussion with the University administration for new tribute to their monopoly business model, and then, failing that, utterly uncontroversial decades-old practices of sharing knowledge among colleagues and students suddenly become a legal case raising core issues like the future of the business model for academic publishers, while even the most absurd protectionist arguments are dutifully repeated by legal flacks on behalf of sustaining the racket. (Thus: It’s difficult to argue that this is a truly noncommercial use [even though Georgia State receives no money from students for the course packs]. Georgia State may be a nonprofit institution, but its students pay a lot of money for course materials, and would presumably pay money for the materials being provided to them by the university.)

A few years ago, when I was living in Ypsilanti, I sat in on a seminar over at the University of Michigan on Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. There were a few textbooks to buy at the University bookstore (most of which I already owned), but a lot of the reading consisted of articles collected into a xeroxed course pack of anthologized articles. To get the course pack you went down to this copy shop in downtown Ann Arbor where the professor had left the master copy for the course pack. You paid Excel a fixed fee for the course pack; they took down the folder with the masters from the shelf, and then escorted you to a self-service copy machine where you had to mash the Copy button in order to make the copies yourself. Then you gave the copied sheets back to them at the counter, where they would take the copies you made back and bind them for you.

The reason that you, personally, had to push the copy button is because xeroxing articles out of books for the purposes of a class is legally speaking, completely non-controversial, but if you paid exactly the same amount of money, and the copy shop did exactly the same thing, except that an employee mashed that Copy button at your behest instead of making you do it yourself, the elimination of that minor inconvenience to the student would instantly convert the transaction from non-commercial to commercial copying, and thus expose the copy shop to a crippling lawsuit, as actually happened to Michigan Document Services in Ann Arbor back in 1992.

So, to be fair, I suppose you can credit the Intellectual Protectionists with fostering knowledge and innovation in one respect: by relentlessly attacking any sharing practice that they can get away with attacking, and exploiting any technological change in order to chip away and obliterate as much of traditional fair use protections as they can manage, have produced an absurd dynamic in which basically identical transactions are treated as radically different from one another, in courts of law, such that, in order to avoid lawsuits, academics, libraries, and copy shops have been forced to invent all kinds of creative new ways of splitting hairs and engaging in the most ridiculous sorts of casuistry just to keep on doing what teachers normally do, while covering themselves from the threat of a ruinous lawsuit.

Thanks, Intellectual Protectionism!

Oh, and by the way.

Incidentally, in case you are interested, the academic publishers currently suing Georgia State University to try and force their students back into the academic publishing racket are Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications. The publisher that went after Michigan Document Services in 1992 was Princeton University Press. Wouldn’t it be interesting—a funny sort of coincidence, you know, one of those weird things that just happens in life when you were least expecting it—if bloggers committed to free minds and free culture just happened to start posting large quotes (of about 10-15 pages) from Cambridge, OUP, Princeton, and Sage books on their public, Google-searchable websites, under principles of fair use? All strictly for the non-commercial purpose of educating interested readers, of course. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out that there was so much interest in talking about the topics covered in one of Cambridge’s, OUP’s, Princeton’s or Sage’s books that the whole book ended up getting posted, by a crazy series of coincidences, in protected bits and pieces on different websites, at the same time that those publishers are trying salvage their broken business model by mounting this massive screwjob on identifiable targets like innocent students at Georgia State?

The funny thing is, I was just thinking the other day that my readers here might enjoy learning some ordinary language philosophy, which might be illuminated by appropriate fair-use quotations from Stanley Cavell’s Must we mean what we say? (Cambridge University Press, 1976/2002), and some ancient moral philosophy, for which an absolutely essential source of appropriate fair-use quotations is Terence Irwin’s masterful study on Plato’s Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1995), and also some feminist political theory, which obviously demands taking a look at some key passages from Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979). If you have a blog yourself, maybe you might find that your readers would be interested in discussing other key passages from those same books. Who knows? Or perhaps they’d be interested in discussions that other fine books from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton and Sage happen to touch on.

I’m just sayin’.

Feel free to let me know what books you’re talking about with your readers about in the comments.

Or, for anyone who’s looking for more of an intermediate, compromise option: