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Another Liberty Canon: Arendt
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the more influential writers on political thought during the twentieth century. Born in Germany, her political views and Jewish origins (she was also Jewish in...
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Another Liberty Canon: Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French writer on various but related topics of power, knowledge, discourse, history of thought, ethics, politics, and so on. His name to some summons negative...
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Expanding the Liberty Canon: Aristotle
Apparently some people have enjoyed the posts on ‘Another Liberty Canon’, so I will keep going on that tack, but with a revision to the heading as I ‘ll be covering some thinkers already accepted into...
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Expanding the Liberty Canon: Aeschylus, Tragedy and the Oresteia
Ancient Athens was the place where the comic and tragic traditions in western drama began. Aeschylus (c. 525 BCE to c. 456) was the first of three great tragedians. The other two will be considered in...
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Expanding the Liberty Canon: Sophocles, the Tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone
Sophocles (496-406BCE) was the second of the three great tragedian of ancient Athens, the first, Aeschylus, was discussed in my last post. Sophocles is best known for a group of three plays known as...
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Expanding the Liberty Canon: Euripides’ Tragedy Ion
Euripides lived from about 480 BCE to 406 BCE. Though he is one of the three great figures of Athenian tragedy, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, who have already been discussed, he may have been...
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Reading the Laws
Correctly interpreting a Platonic dialogue is less a science than an art, one conditioned by many conditions obvious and abstruse. In reading Plato, we must keep in mind the time in which the dialogue...
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Reading the Laws, Part 2
I am writing this in the shadow of Annapurna II, one of the five peaks of the great mountain, and the first that any trekker will see. Annapurna is roughly at the latitude of Florida, and so even in...
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When is violence against the state justified?
I am naturally more conservative by disposition. I don’t mean this in the sense of Republicanism, i.e. that I am a foreign interventionist, a drug abolitionist, a rich elitist, etc. Nor do I mean that...
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Why Republican Libertarianism? II
(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented...
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Why Republican Libertarianism? III
(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented...
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Reading the Laws, Part 4
If you haven’t been following along with the series, you can find the last three entries here: Part One Part Two Part Three *** I recently began reading Joseph Campbell’s well known work, the Hero with...
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Whither the ‘Liberty Canon’ series, amongst other questions?
For those of you who have been wondering what happened to Dr Stocker’s posts here at NOL, the man has been busy: Apologies for lack of blogging. Rather basic tasks, particularly very detailed note...
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Liberty and Homer
The ‘Expanding the Liberty Canon’ label is not adequate for some texts that ought to be discussed with regard to liberty, since they have something important to say about liberty, but even on an...
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More on Liberty and Homer: Tacitus, Montesquieu, and Humboldt
As I have discussed before here, there is a way of writing about liberty in a conscious focus on political thought, which finds liberty to be emulated in some respect, going back at least to the first...
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Barbarian Liberty and Civilisation in Homer
Following from my last two posts, this will explore the sort of ‘barbarian’ liberty that Tacitus recognised in his time, that is of the early Roman empire, and was further explored by Montesquieu and...
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Odysseus and Individuality
The Iliad is the story of Achilles moving from rage with an ally to sympathy with an enemy. Many other characters appear and the extremism of Achilles’ character, which leads him to remove himself from...
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Why I Reject Marxism
I was recently given a copy of History of Political Philosophy edited by Leo Strauss and his successor, Joseph Cropsey. It’s a superb book, a well curated collection of essays by distinguished scholars...
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Milton on Freedom of Printing: Areopagitica
Areopagitica A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644). (For my general introduction to Milton, click here) ‘We turn for a short time from...
View ArticleWhite rappers and hip hop culture
Post Malone has been at the heart of some manufactured controversy recently. Complex and other hipster millennial outlets (x, y) have criticized his appropriation of braids, grills and slang (AAVE), as...
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