For years now, since moving away from Baton Rouge and LSU’s library, I’ve been trying to get my hands on the English translation of De Rege et Regis Institutione (The King and the Education of the King) by the Spanish Scholastic Juan de Mariana.

The book is available for free on Google Books in its original Latin, but my Latin is rather rusty. The English translation by George Albert Moore, however, is much harder to come by, being out of print due to copyright, the perverse academic publishing model of  limited print runs aimed at university libraries for outrageous prices, and lack of sufficient interest to reprint it. I do not see why Google would not have scanned it and put it online too were it not (I assume) still under copyright.

Availability of the Moore translation seems to be largely limited to some university libraries. As an online instructor, I don’t live anywhere near my university’s library. And with two young kids, it’s hard to get out  and hunt down a copy at a nearby university. Occasionally I’ve found it for sale online, but always for outrageous prices. I’ve waited and waited for the price of a copy to come down below $100, so I could talk myself into buying it, but it’s never happened. The cheapest copy on Amazon right now is priced at $275 used.

Why am I so interested in this book? Well, mainly for two reasons: one scholarly, the other pertaining to fiction research. De Rege contains an example of state-of-nature theorizing 50 years older than Hobbes’s Leviathan and a defense of limited, mixed, constitutional government before Locke and Montesquieu. I discuss this in my working paper “On the Origin and Poverty of State-of-Nature Theorizing,” which I’d like to finish it someday. De Rege also belongs to the “mirror for princes” literature.

They are best known in the form of textbooks which directly instruct kings or lesser rulers on certain aspects of rule and behaviour, but in a broader sense, the term is also used to cover histories or literary works aimed at creating images of kings for imitation or avoidance. They were often composed at the accession of a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about to come to power. (Wikipedia)

Machiavelli’s The Prince is a perversion of the mirror-for-princes literature, intentionally turning the literature on its head by teaching a ruler how to acquire and maintain power rather than how to be a good ruler in the moral sense.

The first book of my planned epic science fantasy series will be titled A Mirror for Princes, will feature an example or two of the literature, and will itself be an addition to the literature in the broad sense quoted above. So naturally I want to get a better feel for how this literature is written, what subjects it covers, and so on.

Mariana also defends tyrannicide. So there’s that too.

I finally decided to get my hands on this book by requesting it through InterLibrary Loan (ILL) at my local public library. Now I have hours of slogging work ahead to free The King and the Education of the King from its mortal coil.

I’ve already got a number of posts up, some old and republished from other sites, some new. I’m hoping this won’t be a one-man show, so I’m looking for some regular writers as well as submissions from irregular or part-time contributors. There are already a few others on board, so you should start to see posts from them before long. If you’re interested in contributing a review, news commentary, or the like, contact me.

You can learn more about Prometheus Unbound, my reasons for creating it, and what I’m looking for in submissions by starting with my introductory post. I’m particularly interested in science fiction and fantasy prose fiction, but Prometheus Unbound will be open to submissions dealing with just about any genre or medium, including film, tv, comics and graphic novels, and poetry.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists.

Salam goes on to argue that Amazon will ‘win the internet’ through the Kindle and its rapidly growing ebook sales. I don’t know about that. What does it mean to ‘win the internet’? He only considers Facebook as a rival. What about Google? Android and ChromeOS are poised to dominate the mobile phone and tablet pc markets, putting Google into direct competition with the Kindle. Then there’s Google Search, Books, Voice, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Chrome browser, TV, and so on and so forth.

But bravo to Salam for daring to recognize in public the (probably unintended) positive environmental externalities of business decisions and technological innovation driven by profit-seeking amidst market competition — indeed, for daring to rank them on par with or above that of ‘altruistic’ environmental activists.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’ll admit I was leery of the current iteration of the project, but I am somewhat reassured to hear that Atlas Shrugged will be made into three movies, not one, which is more doable. I’m also reassured that the director and the actor playing Henry Rearden seem to have a decent handle on Ayn Rand’s vision and characters, though I was a bit disquieted by the director mispronouncing Rand’s first name.

From Reason.com’s Hit & Run blog (video below):

Many actors and producers have talked about adapting Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged for the big screen, but 53 years after its publication no one has dared tackle the ambitious project—until now.

Reason.tv heads to the set of Atlas Shrugged Part One to offer viewers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of this most anticipated film.

Director Paul Johansson (One Tree Hill) and Grant Bowler (Lost, True Blood, Ugly Betty), who plays Henry Rearden, discuss the perils, pressures, and pleasure involved in telling the epic tale of a society where the “men of the mind” go on strike and refuse to contribute to a collectivist world.

Produced by Ted Balaker and Hawk Jensen. Camera by Austin Bragg and Hawk Jensen. Production support by Sam Corcos.

Music: “Eu Nao Sabia” by Anamar available from Magnatune Records.

Approximately 5.3 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv downloadable HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I have received official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings,” on my website. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies. The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

“For some reason folks think it’s okay to say to a creator of intellectual property that the product of our labors should be free; yet they never convincingly press that argument at a farmer’s market.”

This is because intellectual property is not legitimate property, whereas a farmer’s produce is. You might check out the following:

• Stephan Kinsella, “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009).
• Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, Mises Institute (2008).
• Roderick T. Long, “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights,” Formulations Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1995).
• Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press (2008).