Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

4 Comments

  1. Kevin Carson
    February 2, 2018 @ 10:55 pm

    Rothbard sounds a lot like Baptist ecclesiastical “historians,” who connect the dots between every heretical group who practiced congregational self-governance and/or adult rebaptism over a 1500-year period, and treat them all as the direct lineage of 16th century Anabaptists. There’s an old Southern Baptist sunday school textbook that argues the Catharii (!!!), &c were really early Baptists. Probably based on a thesis that some poor schmuck actually got a ThD degree for at some Baptist seminary ca. 1900.

    Reply

    • Jack Graham
      February 3, 2018 @ 11:06 am

      Yeah, that sounds a lot like Rothbard’s method.

      Reply

  2. Laurence Price
    February 5, 2018 @ 3:10 pm

    Many thanks- fascinating stuff as ever! Of course, the natural law tradition goes way back beyond the Reformation: through Aquinas and into Aristotle. And at its best, it gives a teleological vision of the good for humanity that is optimistic and makes a certain amount of common sense. (Look at 1890s Catholic social teaching on the dignity of labour and shared humanity for a way in which neo-Thomist thinking can look really quite surprisingly leftist). But it so often seems to have a tendency to be the slave of the status quo and the powerful. What is, is right: “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them, high and lowly, and ordered their estate…”

    Reply

  3. Eve
    February 6, 2018 @ 4:12 am

    It’s an odd thing, to assert that 16th-century Spain has anything to do with 20th-century libtertarianism. Libertarian capitalists want a free market, which Imperial Spain did not have. They want the government to not waste money, which Spain’s government wasted in plenty on wars and opulence. The whole concept of capitalism is based on investment, and it’s not clear that any of the gold that poured into Spain was invested in anything.

    The Spanish Empire is noted for what it extracted from the Americas, and for how many were killed in the process. It is remembered for its inquisition. It is not remembered for any ideas it developed, not for any industry it developed, not for any of the benefits of empire that England and France would enjoy — because beyond proto-modern standards of bringing evidence to a trial, it produced very little of value. From an intellectual standpoint, from a capitalist standpoint, the empire was a dud. Isabella kneecapped the empire before it began by kicking out 90% of its intellectual class.

    Hayek and his crowd point to a small intellectual movement happening in Salamanca and say “Look look look! Proto-capitalism!” And ignore literally everything else that was happening in Spain at the time.

    Reply

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