From my presentation on Saturday at McGill University in Montréal on the history of liberty. (Sponsored by the outstanding Institute for Liberal Studies.)

I finished and submitted my review of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and now I’m working on my response to an essay by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan on “Conceptions of Freedom,” which is drawn from their quite provocative new book A Brief History of Liberty and will be run this week in Cato Unbound. Then I will return to reviewing the copy-editing for my article on “Poverty and Morality” for the volume Poverty and Morality: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. by William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg (set for release September 30, 2010, by Cambridge University Press). Assuming I am not laid low by a cold (horrible sore throat now), I’m off to Istanbul, Ankara, and Sofia on Wednesday.

The Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization with which I work has just published their first book, a Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I found Fooled by Randomness interesting and provocative (even when scoring points against people I know) and a nice followup to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success.

Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences, by Gene Smiley

Smiley’s book I found very helpful, especially concerning the “depression within the depression.”

Among the books I’m enjoying now is Robert Gellately’s Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, which I bought in the Warsaw Airport during a layover between St. Petersburg and Munich.

Gellately helps to make clear the central role of Lenin in the development of the totalitarian terror-state and undoes the myth of “the Good Lenin.”

(I’ve just finished a review of James C. Scott’s remarkable book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. I’ll post a notice when it’s published.)

A nicely done video on the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand. I’m not a follower (I’m more eclectic in my views), but I find much to admire in her work, including the insight regarding the morality of socialism: it’s not the case that people are not good enough for socialism; socialism is not good enough for people. It’s rather promising that her works continue to sell so briskly and that “Ayn Rand Is In.” (I try to expand on some of her insights in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, especially in the chapters on moral philosophy. The long chapter on Rawls moral theory deals with the moral implications of a right to withdraw, a right that is at the core of Atlas Shrugged. It was a major part of my dissertation at Oxford on “A Cosmopolitan Theory of Justice.”)

The FAZ, one of the most influential newspapers in Europe, reviewed my book Realizing Freedom and Detmar Doering’s very good Traktat über die Freiheit. The reviewer, Professor Michael Zöller, is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bayreuth. In the review, which is favorable to both books, he refers to my essay “Twenty Myths About Markets” (in Realizing Freedom) as a “Vademecum [Handbook] for dragon slayers.” He cites approvingly both my and Doering’s attempts to provide a coherent account of liberty that does not load it down with qualifiers; Doering notes that many contemporary formulations of freedom suggest that freedom of movement requires, for its proper enjoyment, not merely the absence of human hindrances to movement, but a Ferrari, and my essay “Freedom Properly Understood” in Realizing Freedom takes aim at such views, including Amartya Sen’s, which seeks to redefine freedom as “the expansion of the ‘capabilities’ of persons to lead the kind of lives they value – and have reason to value,” which I point out requires us to justify our choices to others, rather than simply having the right to make them. Zöller writes,

“In his other essays, Palmer bursts one intellectual balloon after another, be it the common opposition between the state as oriented to the common good vs. society as the expression of self-interest, or the theory of justice of John Rawls, the most influential attempt to expand the definition of freedom. Palmer picks to pieces the so-called Difference Principle, which Rawls used in putting both individual freedom and the equal distribution of opportunities and goods in one and the same social contract.”

I update and comment on matters on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RealizingFreedom

I have just received the PDF of the Dari (the Persian spoken in Afghanistan) version of the book Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by the outstanding economic educators James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee. The new think tank, the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization, will also publish in Dari Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer, and other books. Translations into Pashto are underway. I was in Afghanistan in June and in December and I am very, very happy to be associated with such outstanding libertarians.

I’m also pleased to say that just north of Afghanistan, the Tajikistan Free Market Centre has been started, is honing its business plan, and is preparing to unveil their website and their first projects. (That thanks to the great work of the Central Asian Free Market Institute, headquartered in Bishkek, which provided assistance to their Tajik neighbors after the Fall Free Market School in Issyk Kul. I lectured at the school, and gave a series of lectures in Tajikistan, in Dushanbe and Khudjand, in February of last year.)

Anyone who’d like to provide financial support for these brave people is welcome to contact me.

NOTE: If you click on the link for the Central Asian Free Market Institute, you can get their very impressive 2009 report, in either English or Russian. Please note that the group was formally started in April of last year and had a really brilliant first (partial) year. I’ve gotten several donations for CAFMI already today, so if you’re interested, you won’t be alone. (I’ll bundle them and send them, with no “fee” or “charge” for wiring the money. A dollar donated to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for CAFMI will be a dollar in their account or spent on projects, equipment, and the like that they designate.) This is a very impressive group of young libertarians and they’re doing a lot to promote freedom in a region that has known very little of it.

I’ve finished a careful reading of James C. Scott’s really fascinating, deeply insightful (and occasionally oddly not-very-insightful) book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. I’ll be reviewing it shortly.

I also read a few other books lately, including Malcolm Gladwell’s really fun Outliers: The Story of Success. His writing is so elegant and enjoyable that you have to catch yourself and not be swept away into his conclusions just because of the sheer pleasure of the reading. (I was not convinced of several of his points, notably the discussion of the relationship between intelligence, achievement, and “threshold effects,” especially on pp. 77-90. He might be right, but I was not convinced. The other material on the role of sheer luck in having access to opportunities, however, was quite persuasive.) Another very pleasurable book on luck that I’ve been reading in little bits of down-time standing in lines and the like (but haven’t finished yet) is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.*

Besides some other works I’m working through, I’m hoping to get through Ian Carter’s A Measure of Freedom, which should be helpful for a project on the development of metrics of liberty.

*I admit that I bought the Gladwell and Taleb books from a street cart in Shanghai. I rather suspect that they are pirated editions, which I find dodgy, so I considered (for a few seconds) sending small payments to the authors and to their publishers, but decided instead that I’d buy clearly non-pirated editions in the US.

Peter Klein, “On the Term ‘Religion’“

Two former officials in the government of Vicente Fox have come out in favor of ending the drug war, which is causing enormous harm in Mexico.

Their book, El Narco: La Guerra Fallida (“Narco: The Failed War”) was reviewed January 1 in the Los Angeles Times, “Book takes Mexico drug war to task.”

I met Castenada in Mexico in 2008 at a Cato Institute event, where he made a brilliant case against the current policies. He’s a very impressive thinker.

(Note: I also had discussions in Afghanistan about the disastrous impact of US and European drug policies on that country. The US government is causing tremendous harm worldwide through its drug policies. It’s time to end them. Now.)

I’m expecting the sales of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice in la Francophonie to shoot up! It was reviewed at Contrepoints (in French). Alex Korbel posted a shorter, English version on the book’s Amazon page.

The Chinese edition of the book should be out early this year.

David Boaz has an interesting post at Cato@Liberty: “Ayn Rand Is In“

I had the pleasure of speaking Thursday night at Wabash College in Indiana and had made a condition of accepting that I would get to visit the Goodrich Room in the Library. I’m standing with two of my hosts under the names of Gilgamesh (one of my favorite epics) and the Mahabharata (another of my favorite epics). You can take your own virtual tour of the room here and you can find out about Pierre (pronounced “Peer”) Goodrich here. He was a remarkable visionary and a great benefactor of the cause of liberty.

It was bitter cold, but the reception was warm, the students posed quite interesting and intelligent questions, and I found the discussion very agreeable. Moreover, going to dinner with my hosts and autographing copies of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice after the lecture were enjoyable.

Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice may be just the thing for those looking for Hannukah/Christmas/Kwanzah/Sylvesterabend gifts. (I’ve not forgotten Eid; it’s not too early for next year!) It’s got something for nearly everyone: political theory, economics, sociology, history, political science, foreign policy, popular journalism, legal theory, practical politics, law and economics, sharp and careful responses to critics of libertarianism, and an extensive annotated bibliographical essay on “The Literature of Liberty.” It’s also got a Facebook Fan Page for discussion and has been endorsed by a range of media, academic, and political figures, including:

“Tom Palmer has the ability to make the complex understandable and to go to the heart of the most difficult problems. He is a valuable resource for journalists and others in search of historical and economic scholarship and philosophical insight, especially about the impact of government intervention and the reasons for respecting the freedom and responsibility of individuals.”
—JOHN STOSSEL
ABC News

“The libertarian conception of individual autonomy is often attacked as fostering narrow and selfish individuals who take scant notice of the larger world around them. Tom Palmer’s great contribution in this collection of essays is to lay those misconceptions to rest. He shows how autonomous individuals use their powers to promote exchange and cooperation, which enrich all facets of social life. He exposes the cultural imperialists whose high-falutin’ rhetoric is all too often the prescription for economic protectionism and social stagnation. He reminds us yet again that individual liberty is our most precious social good.”
–RICHARD A. EPSTEIN
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago; author of Simple Rules for a Complex World

“Tom Palmer has been long involved in fighting the battle of ideas; in confronting collectivism, extensive government intervention, and the suppression of human freedom and economic prosperity. This book should be read by all who care about freedom. It is important to remind each generation that freedom can never be taken for granted. Collectivist, anti-libertarian ideologies did not cease to exist at the moment the Iron Curtain fell.”
—VACLAV KLAUS
President of the Czech Republic

“Tom Palmer has been one of liberty’s most eloquent and learned spokespersons for many years. It is a joy to have so many of his lucid, readable, and trenchant essays, written over most of those years, between one set of covers. The essays are independent of each other, enough so that you can sit down and read one here, one there, without needing to know also the hundred or two hundred pages in between. Whatever sort of essay you pick, I guarantee you a good read.”
—JAN NARVESON
University of Waterloo; author, You and the State: A Short Introduction to Political Philosophy and The Libertarian Idea

“Much of this book is devoted to lively defenses of classical liberal and libertarian rights theory against critics and false friends of many sorts. Even more interesting than these sharp rejoinders, though, is Palmer’s reframing and recharacterization of that rights theory. Drawing on his extraordinary interdisciplinary learning, Palmer offers a sociologically, institutionally, and historically informed libertarianism–one that is true to the rich legacy and tradition of classical liberalism.”
—JACOB T. LEVY
Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University; author, The Multiculturalism of Fear

A few other links: Book Forum with Tyler Cowen of GMU and the New York Times, Lecture at Oxford (drawn from the book)

You can purchase Realizing Freedom from Amazon.com, from the Cato Institute, or from other retailers.

I’ll be in Afghanistan over the holidays and I’m bringing copies to my friends (some of the essays have already been published in Persian), along with a sack full of other books and materials.

(Image from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snowman.gif)

I’m looking forward to the new Cambridge University Press book on Poverty and Morality (William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg eds., Cambridge University Press, 2010), in which I have a rather long essay on classical liberalism and poverty. All the jots and tittles have been added, graphs and charts sent, etc., etc. I consider the tradition of classical liberal thinking and work in economic and institutional history, ethical philosophy, intellectual history, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. It was enormously fun to write. (And I’m not only looking forward to seeing my own name in print, as enjoyable as that may be, but to reading the other contributions, from other ethical perspectives.)

It should be available for pre-ordering soon. (Not in time for Isaac Newton’s upcoming 367th birthday, unfortunately, but for the 368th, for sure!)

At noon, eastern standard time (you can watch online, too):

Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice [Facebook page on the book]

BOOK FORUM
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring the author, Tom G. Palmer, General Director, Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, and Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; with comments by Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University, and General Director, Mercatus Center.

And don’t forget that it just might make a fine present for libertarian thinkers, people interested in political theory, history, or economics, and for your favorite thoughtful socialist or conservative who might enjoy an intellectual challenge. (Note: all proceeds from sales go to a good cause, the Cato Institute.)

There will be a Book Forum on my book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, featuring comments by Tyler Cowen, next Tuesday, December 1.

Details here.

A review appeared yesterday in a prominent Shanghai-based paper, Dongfang Daily, “警惕权力哲学的知识保镖“**

The English version is good, too!

**A friend will send an English translation soon.