—“Hi, Curt. Currently going through your reading list. Trying to make myself the best propertarian I can so I can help spread the message. There are plenty of libertarians and conservatives who would take to propertarianism if they got the message. My question is to you what do you think the significance of Aristotle’s work is from a propertarian perspective?”—
Well, Aristotle is as close as we come to the first ‘scientist’, Social: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Smith and Hume, Jefferson, Darwin, Spencer, Durkheim. -vs- physical: Archimedes, Galileo, Copernicus, Davinci, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein
Now, the way I use natural law was a product of the Stoics, not of Aristotle. And I tend to see the greek era as a combination of spartan aristocracy in law rationalized by the Romans, and Aristotelian intellectuals rationalized by the stoics.
I would say that Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Smith, Hume and Jefferson, Darwin, Spencer, Durkheim, and Hayek, represent the attempt (and near failure) to make the case that natural law, discovered by judges by trial end error, is what constitutes social science. And that economics is an empirical branch of that science, as are evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. But those are explanatory fields, whereas natural, judge discovered, common law is a purely empirical field.
And this is why I think of my work as uniting philosophy, morality(Ethics), science, sociology, psychology, and law, into a single universal language – as locke suggested – reducible to statements of the voluntary or involuntary transfer of property defined as that which humans demonstrate as property.
So to summarize, I would say Aristotle is the father of western thought in this sense, and that between Aristotle’s idealism, stoic reason, and roman pragmatism, and finally English empiricism, we developed a chain of reasoning that nearly came to fruition in the last century – but Hayek, Popper, Mises, Brouwer, and Bridgman simply failed. Just as the conservatives failed to produce a competitor to cosmopolitan pseudosciences.
And they failed because they subconsciously had to work around the truth: they were not benevolent Christians, but self-justifying Aryans (elites), and middle-class capitalism like middle-class voting, was a net negative for the simple reason that the success of the western model is reducible to truth, but that as a consequence our political system is reducible to benevolent domestication of animal man. And that was inconceivable to classical liberals so proud of their defeat of the aristocracy that had made their prosperity possible.