Hodgskin’s Libertarian Groundwork

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-98
Author(s):  
Daniel Layman

Thomas Hodgskin, an Englishman who wrote widely in political economy during the first half of the nineteenth century, professed almost slavish devotion to Locke. In following in what he took to be Locke’s footsteps, he devoted his scholarly life to a polemic against “idle” capitalists and landowners. But he simultaneously defended an unflinchingly individualist interpretation of the Lockean project. According to Hodgskin, the world is common only in the sense of being originally unowned, and everyone has a right to anything he can create by laboring on it. He argues that the crushing inequality he observed around him in the fields and cities of the industrial revolution was attributable solely to the violence and cupidity of governments and their cronies. In working out this theory, Hodgskin sketched the principle features of a distinctly libertarian resolution of Locke’s property problem. According to this resolution, there is no problem about reconciling the common right to the world with the growth of private property because the common right is simply a liberty for each person to make use of the world as he might see fit. Thus, despite his left-leaning criticisms of capitalism and absentee landownership, Hodgskin planted seeds that would develop, in Spooner’s later work, into the core of the right-libertarianism we know today.

1952 ◽  
Vol 98 (413) ◽  
pp. 515-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Yap

Few mental diseases have attracted the attention of medical men working in outlandish parts of the world more than Latah. This is due, not only to its intrinsic interest, showing as it regularly does the unusual symptoms of echolalia, echopraxia, and automatic obedience, but also to its remarkable geographical distribution. This illness was described by travellers to the Malay Archipelago in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but very similar reactions were later found to exist in other lands, known to the native peoples by other names. The term “Latah,” however, is the best known, and as the common features between these various reactions became apparent, it has been used as an inclusive name for them all. It is to-day employed with much the same connotation in the French, Dutch, Italian, and English literature, but the discussion of its nature betrays inadequate understanding, attempts at its nosological classification remain unsatisfactory, and speculations as to its aetology continue to be somewhat fanciful.


1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 538-594
Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Warfield

In a recent number of The Harvard Theological Review, Professor Douglas Clyde Macintosh of the Yale Divinity School outlines in a very interesting manner the religious system to which he gives his adherence. For “substance of doctrine” (to use a form of speech formerly quite familiar at New Haven) this religious system does not differ markedly from what is usually taught in the circles of the so-called “Liberal Theology.” Professor Macintosh has, however, his own way of construing and phrasing the common “Liberal” teaching; and his own way of construing and phrasing it presents a number of features which invite comment. It is tempting to turn aside to enumerate some of these, and perhaps to offer some remarks upon them. As we must make a selection, however, it seems best to confine ourselves to what appears on the face of it to be the most remarkable thing in Professor Macintosh's representations. This is his disposition to retain for his religious system the historical name of Christianity, although it utterly repudiates the cross of Christ, and in fact feels itself (in case of need) quite able to get along without even the person of Christ. A “new Christianity,” he is willing, to be sure, to allow that it is—a “new Christianity for which the world is waiting”; and as such he is perhaps something more than willing to separate it from what he varyingly speaks of as “the older Christianity,” “actual Christianity,” “historic Christianity,” “actual, historical Christianity.” He strenuously claims for it, nevertheless, the right to call itself by the name of “Christianity.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Piotr Urbanowicz

Summary In this text, I argue that there are numerous affinities between 19th century messianism and testimonies of UFO sightings, both of which I regarded as forms of secular millennialism. The common denominator for the comparison was Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment of the world” in the wake of the Industrial Revolution which initiated the era of the dominance of rational thinking and technological progress. However, the period’s counterfactual narratives of enchantment did not repudiate technology as the source of all social and political evil—on the contrary, they variously redefined its function, imagining a possibility of a new world order. In this context, I analysed the social projects put forward by Polish Romantics in the first half of the 19th century, with emphasis on the role of technology as an agent of social change. Similarly, the imaginary technology described by UFO contactees often has a redemptive function and is supposed to bring solution to humanity’s most dangerous problems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-71
Author(s):  
David Todd

This chapter investigates the political economy of French informal imperialism, revealing a little-known facet of the intellectual origins of globalization, and confirming that the pursuit of empire and the emergence of global consciousness were inextricably linked. It highlights lesser known thinkers, which helps recover what the prevailing attitudes of the informed liberal-leaning public towards empire actually were. After 1815, once the word “liberal” entered the political lexicon, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the Abbé Dominique de Pradt, and Michel Chevalier described themselves as liberals — with some justification, since they admired Britain's balanced constitution and were stalwart advocates of free trade. Recovering their views on empire therefore helps to suggest that French liberals did not become imperialistic in the mid-nineteenth century, but instead consistently harboured imperial ambitions, even if, for pragmatic reasons, they tended to shun territorial expansion after 1815. Focusing on these neglected but influential figures also helps correct the common perception of France as having withdrawn from the international stage after the fall of Napoleon.


Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow

I have tried in this book to summarize where the world economy has come from in the past three centuries and to set out the core of the agenda that lies before us as we face the century ahead. This century, for the first time since the mid-18th century, will come to be dominated by stagnant or falling populations. The conclusions at which I have arrived can usefully be divided in two parts: one relates to what can be called the political economy of the 21st century; the other relates to the links between the problem of the United States playing steadily the role of critical margin on the world scene and moving at home toward a solution to the multiple facets of the urban problem. As for the political economy of the 21st century, the following points relate both to U.S. domestic policy and U.S. policy within the OECD, APEC, OAS, and other relevant international organizations. There is a good chance that the economic rise of China and Asia as well as Latin America, plus the convergence of economic stagnation and population increase in Africa, will raise for a time the relative prices of food and industrial materials, as well as lead to an increase in expen ditures in support of the environment. This should occur in the early part of the next century, If corrective action is taken in the private markets and the political process, these strains on the supply side should diminish with the passage of time, the advance of science and innovation, and the progressively reduced rate of population increase. The government, the universities, the private sector, and the professions might soon place on their common agenda the delicate balance of maintaining full employment with stagnant or falling populations. The existing literature, which largely stems from the 1930s, is quite illuminating but inadequate. And the experience with stagnant or falling population in the the world economy during post-Industrial Revolution times is extremely limited. This is a subject best approached in the United States on a bipartisan basis, abroad as an international problem. It is much too serious to be dealt with, as it is at present, as a domestic political football.


Author(s):  
Booysen Sabeho Tubulingane ◽  
Neeta Baporikar

Universities contribute to the creation of a knowledgeable and skilled national workforce. The world over, universities are hailed as one of the old forms of organizations that have been instrumental in contributing to the development of many nations by producing skilled and intellectual human resources needed to produce goods and services. For this role fulfillment, the universities must ensure student satisfaction as students are the core of the very existence of universities and most important stakeholders in the higher education scenario. Moreover, student satisfaction is likely to enhance not only the better teaching-learning process, knowledge transfer, but also the competitiveness of the universities. This is all the more relevant and probably the best way to adopt for the university to play their role effectively and also is competitive in emerging economies. Hence, adopting a quantitative descriptive cross-sectional research methodology, this study aims to deliberate on how student satisfaction is the right approach and can drive university competitiveness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Karen Y. Morrison

Abstract With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Lisa L. Martin

In a comparison of today’s global political economy with that of the last great era of globalization, the late nineteenth century, the most prominent distinction is be the high degree of institutionalization in today’s system. While the nineteenth-century system did have some important international institutions—in particular the gold standard and an emerging network of trade agreements—it had nothing like the scope and depth of today’s powerful international economic institutions. We cannot understand the functioning of today’s global political economy without understanding the sources and consequences of these institutions. Why were international organizations (IOs) such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or International Monetary Fund (IMF) created? How have they gained so much influence? What difference do they make for the functioning of the global economy and the well-being of individuals around the world? In large part, understanding IOs requires a focus on the tension between the use of power, and rules that are intended to constrain the use of power. IOs are rules-based creatures. They create and embody rules for gaining membership, for how members should behave, for monitoring, for punishment if members renege on their commitments, etc. However, these rules-based bodies exist in the anarchical international system, in which there is no authority above states, and states continue to exercise power when it is in their self-interest to do so. While states create and join IOs in order to make behavior more rule-bound and predictable, the rules themselves reflect the global distribution of power at the time of their creation; and they only constrain to the extent that states find that the benefits of constraint exceed the costs of the loss of autonomy. The tension between rules and power shapes the ways in which international institutions function, and therefore the impact that they have on the global economy. For all their faults, international economic institutions have proven themselves to be an indispensable part of the modern global political economy, and their study represents an especially vibrant research agenda.


1987 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald D. Renard

In 1809, representatives of Chiang Mai and the Kayah State of Kantarawaddy marked their mutual boundary by releasing a buffalo on the summit of a range of mountains and erecting markers on the line it followed. As this episode suggests, these Kayahs and Thais (and also Burmans) translated the world into cognitive maps quite different from those of the British colonialists who would later rule in Burma. The anthropologist, Edmund Leach, noted this difference in his “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, observing that European concepts of frontier, state, and nation are not always applicable to Burma where the frontier is not an absolute division but “a border zone through which cultures interpenetrate in a dynamic manner”. This paper examines the interaction between the Kayah-Thai-Burman and the British conceptions of frontier in the working out of demarcated borders between the Kayah states and Thailand during the nineteenth century.


1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Blok

The origins of the modern Sicilian latifundium go back to the early nineteenth century when feudal land was transformed by law into private property. In what is called the Risorgtmento, a rising rural bourgeoisie gradually replaced the traditional feudal elite by acquiring most of the land that came on the market. Although the peasants had become legally free, they obtained their freedom at the cost of title to the land they held under feudal conditions. The common use rights of gleaning and pasturage, which the peasants exercised on the former fiefs, guaranteed them the fundamental means of living. But arbitrarily excluded by the avid bourgeoisie from a share in the land that should be given out to them as a recompense for the lost use rights, the Sicilian peasants emerged from social servitude only to fall into economic and political dependency. A growing rural proletariat was the necessary concomitant of the partly feudal and partly capitalist enterprise that was the latifundium.


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