I just had an article published in Libertarian Papers:
“Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia,” Libertarian Papers 3, 16 (2011).
Here’s the abstract:
This paper builds on the burgeoning tradition of Aristotelian liberalism. It identifies and critiques a fundamental inequality inherent in the nature of the state and, in particular, the liberal representative-democratic state: namely, an institutionalized inequality in authority. The analysis draws on and synthesizes disparate philosophical and political traditions: Aristotle’s virtue ethics and politics, Locke’s natural rights and idea of equality in authority in the state of nature (sans state of nature), the New Left’s conception of participatory democracy (particularly as described in a number of under-utilized essays by Murray Rothbard and Don Lavoie), and philosophical anarchism. The deleterious consequences of this fundamental institutionalized inequality are explored, including on social justice and economic progress, on individual autonomy, on direct and meaningful civic and political participation, and the creation and maintenance of other artificial inequalities as well as the exacerbation of natural inequalities (economic and others). In the process, the paper briefly sketches a neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics and natural individual rights, for which the principle of equal and total liberty for all is of fundamental political importance. And, finally, a non-statist conception of politics is developed, with politics defined as discourse and deliberation between equals (in authority) in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being).
Follow the link above for the pdf and MS Word files as well as discussion of the article on the Libertarian Papers website. You can also download the pdf from my Mises.org Literature archive.
Older versions of this article were presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 and appeared in my doctoral dissertation (May 2009) as chapters six and seven.
[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]
So I’ve gone and moved my website to a new domain name, from veritasnoctis.net to gaplauche.com. The new blog url is now, of course, gaplauche.com/blog/. No need for any ‘www’ prefix.
I figure the new domain is more professional and SEO-friendly.
I could have kept the same Feedburner url, but decided instead to make it match the new domain name. So if you’re reading this post on one of my old rss feeds, you’ll need to change your subscription url to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gaplauche if you want to keep following my blog. I’ll soon be deactivating the old ones.
All of the old veritasnoctis.net urls should redirect automatically to their gaplauche.com counterparts. Please let me know if you run into any trouble in this regard.
I suppose now I should start blogging here more, eh?
Most of my blogging lately has been going on over at The Libertarian Standard and Prometheus Unbound.
I may cross-post from time to time, but I don’t want this blog to consist merely of duplicate content. So please do follow those sites if you aren’t already — TLS for general news, commentary, and analysis from an Austro-Libertarian perspective; Prometheus Unbound for news and reviews of fiction, primarily science fiction and fantasy, from a libertarian perspective. Oh, and we’re looking for more contributors to Prometheus Unbound, if you’re interested.
That was to be the subtitle for my chapter in Open Court‘s recent addition to their Popular Culture and Philosophy series, Transformers and Philosophy: More Than Meets the Mind. Alas, no subtitles made it into the book.
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.
Political Science PhD
