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Moral Visions of the Free Market

February 8, 2013 By 10 Comments

free marketby Glen Austin Sproviero

Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny
 edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler

For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for advancing the cause of wealth unmoored from traditional notions of the common good are finding allies in unlikely places. In this collection of essays, editors Doug Bandow and David Schindler bring together an eclectic mix of thinkers to discuss the morality of free-market systems. While the essays are not deliberately set in conversation, they naturally form a flowing dialogue.

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Filed Under: Books, David L. Schindler, Economics, Glen Sproviero, Home, Political Economy, University Bookman February 8, 2013

Founding Fathers on War: Madison to Jefferson Letter of 1798

February 8, 2013 By 1 Comment
by Mike Church
 
Founding Fathers

Mike Church

Senator Rand Paul has been using the following quotation in his speeches to the United States Senate and most recently used this in a speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation discussing “constitutional foreign policy” as the founding fathers had envisioned.

“Madison wrote, ‘The Constitution supposes what history demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch most prone to war and most interested in it, therefore the Constitution has with studied care vested that power in the Legislature.’”

After watching Senator Paul’s speech and becoming intrigued by the Madison line which he referred to, I began searching for the source which his notes did not provide. In my search I encountered dozens of articles citing the line, most attributed to Senator Paul (see here and here). After a thorough search using Google I could not locate the passage in question verbatim until I stumbled upon this reference which narrowed my search down to a letter written to Thomas Jefferson in “c. 1798″ (circa 1798). [Read more...]
Filed Under: American Founding, American Republic, Foreign Affairs, James Madison, Mike Church, Thomas Jefferson February 8, 2013

Know Your Gnostics: Eric Voegelin & the Neoconservative Disease

February 8, 2013 By 1 Comment

by Gene Callahan

Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin often is regarded as a major figure in 20th-century conservative thought—one of his concepts inspired what has been a popular catchphrase on the right for decades, “don’t immanentize the eschaton”—but he rejected ideological labels. In his youth, in Vienna, he attended the famous Mises Circle seminars, where he developed lasting friendships with figures who would be important in the revival of classical liberalism, such as F.A. Hayek, but he later rejected their libertarianism as yet another misguided offshoot of the Enlightenment project. Voegelin has sometimes been paired with the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott, who greatly admired his work, but he grounded his political theorizing in a spiritual vision in a way that was quite foreign to Oakeshott’s thought. Voegelin once wrote, “I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology… a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian.” [Read more...]
Filed Under: Books, Conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Gene Callahan, Gnosticism, Michael Oakeshott, The American Conservative February 8, 2013