The Habermasian Moment

Among spokemen for the Post-Marxist Left, Jürgen Habermas (1923–) may be the most prominent and, in his own country, the most honored. An advocate of “militant” democracy since the 1950s, he has defended his persuasion in the international press, in multiple books and articles, and as an academic lecturer.

Volume 19, Number 2 (2005)

Contra Spooner

The inability of modern philosophers to furnish any kind of argument for the maintenance of a government is a notorious weakness. In Lysander Spooner’s writings, it becomes an odd strength. Throughout such writings as No Treason, A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, and “Natural Law,” Spooner asks why taxation and participation in the workings of the state should be compulsory. He concludes that there is no legitimate reason, and that government is the instrument of robbery, slavery, and murder.

Volume 18, Number 3 (2004)

Is “Malinvestment” Enough to Go Bust?

The business cycle refers to fairly broad changes in economic activity according to a well-identified sequence, which includes a boom, a crisis, a period of stagnation, and then a new expansion.1 This sequence tends to repeat itself; but neither the length of the cycle, nor the intervals between cycles necessarily follows a regular time pattern. There is substantial agreement both about this definition and about the temporal irregularities.

The Corporation at Issue, Part I: The Clash of Classical Liberal Values and the Negative Consequences for Capitalist Practices

In an article published in this journal, Walter Block (2002, pp. 3–36) is rather scathing about Henry Simons’s credentials as a champion of free enterprise. But it seems possible to be considerably more generous to Simons than Block is, and to regard him as significantly less unlibertarian than Block does, which is not to deny that many of Simons’s policy proposals cannot be squared with classical liberal or libertarian principles, or that much of Block’s critique is justified.