Leonid Nikonov is a contributor to The Morality of Capitalism.

I just finished Henri Francfort’s quite interesting book The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, from which I picked up some very interesting information and ideas. The discusion of Mesopotamia was quite interesting (including the short description of Urukagina’s attack on predatory behavior by the rulers of Lagash, probably the first libertarian reform movement of recorded history), the discussion of the writing system, etc. Similarly, the treatment of Egyptian civilization was helpful, although I found the following (page numbers from undated edition from Doubleday Anchor Books, New York):

“On one side, Narmer, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, destroys a chieftain of the northern marches. On the other side, the king, now wearing the crown of Lower Egypt, inspects a number of beheaded enemies. Thus, Narmer is shown as the first ‘Lord of the Two Lands.’” (p. 91)

From a scribal text: “And now the scribe lands on the river bank and is about to register the harvest tax. The janitors carry staves and the Nubians (policemen) rods of palm, and they say, ‘Hand over the corn,’ though there is none. The cultivator is beaten all over, he is bound and thrown into the well, soused, and dipped head downwards. His wife has been bound in his presence, his children are in fetters. His neighbors abandon him and are fled.” (p. 105) (Francfort follows with “If such brutality had been the rule, it is clear that Egyptian society could not have survived,” but he does not suggest it was uncommon, either.)

“The upper register shows the deceased in his function as ‘Scribe of the fields of the Lord of the Two Lands.’ On the left are shown a group of his officials, dressed in white, pencase in hand, busy measuring the grain on the stalk; their attendants (with bare bodies) hold the measuring cord. A peasant (followed by his wife who carries a basked on her head with further gifts) offers something to the tax officials, to propitiate them. But on the right, before the kiosk of the tomb owner and near the mooring-place of the boat, which brought his subordinates to the scene, a peasant, who apparently defaulted, is beaten, while another kneels and prays for grace.” (p. 107)

“If officials abused their power and oppressed the people, the peasants had an effective weapon at their disposal: they fled.” (p. 115)

Interesting. Oddly, here is how Francfort concludes his study of Egypt:

“Whatever aspect of Egyptian society we have scrutinized, we have found Pharaoh at the centre. Yet nothing would be more misleading than to picture the Egyptians in abject submission to their absolute ruler. Their state can be described as ‘a self-directed organism held together by a common regard for their customary rights and obligations.’ [Footnote to F. M. Powicke, The Reformation in England, Oxford, 1941, p. 31] Their polity was not imposed but evolved from immemorial predilections, and was adhered to without protest, for almost three thousand years. Similar predilections have, in fact, maintained the institution of divine kingship among Africans related to the ancient Egyptians down to our own days. It was good, not evil; it gave a sense of security which the Asiatic contemporaries of the ancient Egyptians totally lacked. If a god had consented to guide the nation, society held a pledge that the unaccountable forces of nature would be well disposed and would bring prosperity and peace. Truth, justice, were ‘that by which the gods live,’ an essential element in the established order. Hence Pharaoh’s rule was not tyranny, nor his service slavery.” (pp. 119-120)

I try to be careful not to read back onto such different contexts and civilizations ideas and concepts that are more familiar to me, but may have been foreign to the people of the time, but the beheadings and beatings sound rather like coercion to me, and apparently were perceived as such by the people who tried to avoid them, and not very much like “a common regard for their customary rights and obligations.”

More information on the book and the associated project here.

It’s taken a while to get through Timothy Snyder’s very important book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, not because it was dense, but because it is relentless in its account of the killings that took place in what Snyder calls the “Bloodlands,” meaning the “territories subject to both German and Soviet police power and associated mass killing policies at some point between 1933 and 1945.” Those territories encompass Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics, where the great bulk of the victims of the mass killings of the Communists and the National Socialists lived.

I learned a great deal from Snyder’s book, including the history of the various Warsaw uprisings, the systematic murder of Poles and Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine, the differences between the murder camps and the slave labor camps (with Auschwitz serving both functions), the diplomatic misperceptions of Hitler and Stalin (Stalin was obsessed by a non-existent Polish-Japanese encirclement strategy against the USSR), the reasons for the various shifts and variations between policies of murder and enslavement, and much more.

To understand better the crimes of collectivism, I recommend also Frank Dikötter’s outstanding (and similarly morally exhausting) Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. (I recall from Applebaum’s book the astonishing information that the Communists issues numerical quotas for arrests and executions. I’m not easily shocked, but that fact shocked me. I had read before Vladimir Nobokov’s surrealistic Invitation to a Beheading, which I found quite puzzling…until I read that fact in Applebaum’s book.) Snyder investigates and explains the nature of the quotas in much greater detail than Applebaum.

Stalin and Yezhov wanted “the direct liquidation of the enter counter-revolution,” which meant the elimination of enemies “once and for all.” The revised quotas were sent back down from Moscow to the regions as part of Order 00447, dated 31 July 1937, “On the Operations to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” Here Stalin and Yezhov anticipated the execution of 79,950 Soviet citizens by shooting and the sentencing of 193,000 more to eight to ten years in the Gulag. It was not that the politburo or the NKVD central office in Moscow had 272,950 particular people in mind for repression. Just which Soviet citizens would fulfill these quotas remained to be seen; the local NKVD branches would decide that.

The killing and imprisonment quotas were officially called “limits,” though everyone involved knew that they were meant to be exceeded. Local NKVD officers had to explain why they could not meet a “limit,” and were encouraged to exceed them. No NKVD officer wished to be seen as lacking élan when confronting “counter-revolution,” especially when Yezhov’s line was “better too far than not far enough.” Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00047.
—Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 81

I’m finishing up a lot of projects before packing for a trip to libertarian meetings in Nigeria, Kosovo, France, and Italy, and can’t write more (too much to do!), but I hope to return to this later.

The Liberty Fund has done us all a great service. The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 1: The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics is now available and it’s instructive and delightful. You can buy the book very inexpensively here, or download the E-Book or PDF at zero price here. It was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal here.

Bastiat was a good economist, a wonderful teacher, and a brilliant champion of peace and freedom. I hope you find the time to introduce yourself to him. I am confident that you will not regret the experience.

In the course of reading to understand better the differences and the dispute between Voltaire and Rousseau, I read a truly wonderful book, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. I cannot recommend this book too highly to those who are interested in intellectual history, not merely as the history of books, but as the history of intellects. It’s a great read and very, very rewarding.

(In Spanish, with French subtitles, but the visuals are compelling and clear.)

Vasily Grossman in 1945

–Vasily Grossman, from his great novel Life and Fate

More on freedom:

“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that “In people’s day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers’ battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one’s children’s stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire.” (Grossman, p. 110)
– Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1986)

I took my time to read this book, but it was worth it. Gurcharan Das‘s The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma is a worthy companion to a long journey, or something to be read like one sips a cup of hot tea on a very cold day. It’s a meditation on living a good life, organized around the virtues and vices exhibited by the characters in the great Indian epic The Mahabharata (here’s a shortened prose version from R. K. Narayan). Das weaves together examples from the text, experiences from his life in business (he was CEO of Procter & Gamble India), and insights and comparisons from his wide reading in moral philosophy to form a book that is favorably comparable to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

A dominant theme of the book is that “dharma is subtle,” i.e., doing the right thing is not just a matter of having a good will; rather, it’s often hard to know what is the right thing to do. (Das is widely read and his work introduced me to some ideas and books of which I was previously ignorant. The Difficulty of Being Good would have benefited from a comparison of the idea of dharma with Aristotle’s discussion of practical judgement, or phronesis; perhaps such a comparison would provide a good topic for a student working in comparative moral philosophy.)

In addition to being a subtle writer and thinker on matters of living well, Das is an articulate and outspoken classical liberal (libertarian) who writes a column for The Times of India. He is the chairman of the Centre for Civil Society. Here is his speech April 8, 2011 before a gigantic crowd in Tahrir Square, Egypt, the most rousing speech to a mass audience on the rule of law that I’ve ever seen.

From Russia Today

It reminds me of other utterly crazy and despicable attempts to dust off communist tyranny and try it “one more time”: for example, G. A. Cohen on Self-Ownership, Property, and Equality. (That essay and many others, including my essay on “Classical Liberalism, Marxism, and the Conflict of Classes: The Classical Liberal Theory of Class Conflict,” are also available in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.)

It has been a long time since I could bear to look at my blog without being overcome by sadness and grief, as I miss my friend a great deal. I could not bear to write anything and let the note I had posted the day after she died in my arms slide down the page like just another ephemeral comment on politics. My friendly webmaster and his colleagues have created a place where I can keep my thoughts on her on the page. (See the upper right.)

I have worked a great deal since losing her, despite having been both very sad and quite ill for some time from pertussis (aka whooping cough), parasites, and a thankfully brief viral liver infection. During that time I have traveled and worked in thirteen countries (plus various cities in the US) and gotten some things done, in addition to reading several stacks of books. I’ll report on some of the books later, including my readings on the rather surprising intellectual roots of neoconservatism, on economic history, on the philosophical case for “redistribution,” on ancient and contemporary Chinese history, on Central European literature, and on various other topics. I’ll also try to find the time to organize the notes I have been setting aside for a short essay on friendship occasioned by some of the things I learned from the best friend I have ever had. This year has been a very bad year for me, but I will try to make the next one better.

In Beijing with Li Ziyang, author of The Power of the Market

My colleague Jude Blanchette and I had a very fruitful meeting with some remarkable Japanese libertarians this evening. More meetings tomorrow!

I also discovered earlier today an interesting review from July 11 of this year of Realizing Freedom. I had the pleasure of being able to discuss the ideasa with the author of the review this evening; he had read my book in an Amazon Kindle edition….on his iPhone; now that is dedicated.

The full text, translated from French into Arabic, of “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” is now available online: “ما يرى وما لا يرى”

The French text is available here (in full facsimile) and here (as html), and the English here.

Congratulations to my colleagues at Minbaralhurriyya.org (The Forum of Liberty), a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Bastiat is coming out in a lot of other languages, as well, as part of our “Bastiat Legacy” project: AtlasNetwork.org/BastiatLegacy, which includes short videos on themes dear to Bastiat (also translated into numerous languages), essay contest, seminars, summer schools, and more.

My interview on Fox Business while here in Berlin. (It’s a part of a whole program on Milton Friedman’s legacy.)

The conference hall of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kabul for the presentation of the Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
Presentation by me on the foundations of prosperity and peaceful cooperation
Presentation by Prof Nasrullah Stanikzai on the relations between law and economics

I’m in Kabul and just saw that my review in Reason of The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott is now online. It’s quite relevant to the policies that the Bobama administration is trying to promote here. (It turns out that mountain people often resent outsiders telling them what to do. Go figure.) Here’s the review.

Lots of meetings lined up in several cities in Afghanistan. More later, after they’re over and I’m on my way to a neighboring country.

Jeffrey A. Miron presented his book Libertarianism, from A to Z at a forum at the Cato Institute, and I presented the comments, including a little history of the term “libertarian” and my criticisms of Jeff’s appeal to “consequential libertarianism.”

The full video of the book forum is available here.