Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power explanation for how the pathetic morality of the weak can prevail over the strong. “The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership” (section 863). In the first essay of Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche raises a historical puzzle. He has contrasted […]
Nietzsche as public choice theorist Read More »
Five quotations from Ludwig von Mises from five works on his opposition to anarchism: “Society cannot do without a social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, i.e., without state and government.” The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 90. “There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary evil. However, what is needed in order to attain
Mises on Anarchism Read More »
Robert Heilbroner was the most famous American socialist intellectual of the 20th century. His The Worldly Philosophers sold millions, making it the second-best-selling economics textbook of all time. In my Business and Economic Ethics course, we read and discuss one of his articles. Here is Heilbroner, writing in 1980, about who owns what under socialism:
Robert Heilbroner on socialism’s mandatory labor Read More »
Returning to this graphic’s placement of Michel Foucault on the spectrum between Marx and Heidegger. Why? Recall Foucault’s own words:: “I am simply a Nietzschean.” And: “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher.”* Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Foucault was a member of the
Why Foucault as “basically a Nazi”? Read More »
The “Heidegger Wars” are an academic battle about the significance of Martin Heidegger’s commitment to Natonal Socialism as an ideology and to the Nazi Party in particular. William H. F. Altman’s important book, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration, opens with this question: “Was Martin Heidegger an apolitical
Heidegger and World War One — Altman’s good book Read More »
In the following two passages, with a nod to Tocqueville, Mill makes two strong claims. First he praises American culture: “Almost all travellers are struck by the fact that every American is in some sense both a patriot, and a person of cultivated intelligence. … No such wide diffusion of the ideas, tastes, and sentiments
J.S. Mill on American culture and politics Read More »
Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009). Some key quotations from
Heidegger’s anti-humanism and the Left Read More »
Bulletin: Sex and Economics — A Modest Proposal Fellow citizens: Our nation’s sex life is in peril. Surveys show widespread sexual discontent. Market failure is everywhere. Many males complain of not getting enough sex and many females object to constant male looks and advances. Other males are dissatisfied with the options available in their local
From the Office of the Reproducer-General Read More »