Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

MORE ON SEAN GABB’S RECENT WORK

I don’t have an account on Sean’s server, so I can’t comment there. But what Sean posted were my NOTES as I read thru the book. Those notes reflect my thoughts about what he’s saying in each chapter, and how it contrasts with my own work – just as I do with all books, papers, or articles that I read.

A review has a different objective from one’s notes. And a review discusses the book on its merits. And as such If I’d posted a review (I don’t claim to be even an adequate reviewer), It would be extremely complimentary, where my notes convey differences, or disputes, with my work, rather than a combination of agreements, explanations, and disputes in general.

As an American (we are far more confident and confrontational than europeans – hence tepid male behavior in London night clubs), and I argue very aggressively and controversially. And I have been trying to merge conservatism and the two branches of libertarianism (anglo and jewish) since about 2009 or so. So I’ve ‘accepted’ the course of events longer than other libertarians (Or in my world, “Sovereigntarians”)

But Sean has a different objective in the UK, and the UK has been far more … or rather much slower in adapting to the … excessive liberalism of the jewish wing of libertarianism’s claims. Americans have dealt with diversity (involuntary integration and immigration) for far longer and we have a better understanding of the consequences.

And the British (and continental) audience is more sentimental and moral and less martial and legal than American. So my notes reflect those different cultural proclivities.

In that sense, Sean’s book is an exceptionally complete collection of essays that address the argumentative needs of the demographic, in the tone that needs addressing.

And by complete I mean, that the book is long enough and covers enough topics, in familiar enough terms, that one is left with the feeling Sean achieves his goal migrating libertarian thought.

My only criticisms are :

1) that Sean doesn’t really offer a substantive suite of solutions, and that’s because, I think that his target audience is not yet READY to accept the solutions that would be necessary for the reconstruction and consequent preservation of any condition of liberty. And as such even if Brits and Continentals (Not to mention Canadians) learned of solutions that would serve, they would reject them. The most obvious is the failure to grasp the importance of hierarchy, and the legalism (strict logic) that is necessary in law (and absent in British law) to produce (restore) conditions of liberty WHILE at the same time producing those commons (redistributive services) British are so proud of.

And 2) I think more work would have to be done on achieving unity with the right. Or stated differently, I think the issue is the moral language of the right, and the rationalist language of the libertarians, where in America we just use legal language (which is the social sciences equivalent of formal logic) and without that unifying language the two groups cannot be united because of a lack of common semantics and paradigms. Law is operational. All else is allegorical.

Even so, there are very few people who can manage technical discourse and Sean’s more .. literary approach is undoubtably more effective at moving a body polity and for those reasons this book is, especially given the … drought .. in non-sophomoric libertarian literature … is exceptional.

Sure, you can argue Hazlitt was a bit better, but you have to get all the way to Hazlitt to find someone that did the job as well.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute